Predicting audience demographics of web sites: Design vs. Content cues

The size and dynamism of the Web poses challenges for all its stakeholders which includes producers of content, consumers of content, and advertisers who want to place advertisements next to relevant content. A critical piece of information for producers/publishers of content as well as advertisers is the demographics of the consumers who are likely to visit a given web site. In this paper we explore predictive models that attempt to deduce the audience demographics of a web site using cues embedded in the design or the content of its homepage. We find that it is possible to effectively predict different types of demographics of consumers of web sites based on the suggested approach. Through a statistical analysis we also find that several design elements vary significantly among websites dominated by different demographic classes.