Innovation Diffusion: Early Adopters and the Spread of Technology, pt. 4

In Click, Tancer uses psychographic and demographic data about visitors to YouTube (collected by Hitwise), to determine the kind of people who made up the Early Adopter category for the site.

            While the demographics of these early users didn’t surprise data collectors at Hitwise (users were primarily young people — 39 percent in the 18-24-year-old category — who lived in California — more than 25 percent of all users — and earned under $60,000 per year — 57 percent of users.) But what Tancer uncovered about the psychographics of visitors was more compelling: the majority of Early Adopters for YouTube — those who first shared clips via email — belonged to very specific categories in the Claritas PRIZM market segmentation system: Bohemian Mix, Money and Brains, and Young Digerati.

            When Hitwise analyzed the same early-visitor data for other Web 2.0 sites, from Facebook to Flickr, it found that these particular psychographic segments were Early Adopters for all the sites it traced.

            The market research undertaken by Claritas to group each person in the United States into a specific psychographic segment gives us a sort of inside look at the types of people who are spreading innovation to mainstream markets.  By knowing more about these groups, we can determine which types of technology are likely to catch on and also predict which technologies will likely be “the next big thing” based on information about which sites these Early Adopters are now visiting.