Roper: Readers Of Online Papers More Outspoken Than Public At Large

Almost half of all U.S. online readers of the NYTimes.com can be considered "influentials"--meaning they're both opinionated and eager to share their views, according to a Roper study released Tuesday.

For the report, Roper this June asked 4,120 registered NYTimes.com users a battery of 10 questions designed to evaluate their interest in swaying others, such as whether they had voted in the last year, written or called politicians, sent e-mails to companies, made a speech, and the like.

Forty-eight percent of NYTimes.com registered users were classified as influentials, based on having answered "yes" to at least three of the questions. Just 10 percent of the general population and 15 percent of the online population qualified as influentials in a Roper survey conducted in June, said Geoff Feinberg, a vice president in the Roper Public Affairs division.

This recent study isn't the only one to conclude that newspaper sites attract a large proportion of so-called influentials. A June 2003 RoperASW survey commissioned by the WashingtonPost.com found that 34 percent of visitors to that site met the criteria for influentials. For that report, Roper surveyed more than 8,000 random visitors to the site.

For the most recent NYTimes.com survey, Roper compared the influentials among the site's registered users to Web influentials in general, and concluded that online Times readers are better educated and have higher incomes than their counterparts at large. Forty-six percent of NYTimes.com influentials have post-graduate degrees or doctorates, compared to 13 percent of all online influentials, and average household income of NYTimes.com influentials was $123,000, compared to the $69,000 average of all Web influentials.

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