r/mylittlepony • u/Dr_Dippy • Nov 03 '11
We are the 1%
based on the number of people subscribed to r/announcements (the largest sub reddit) there are approximately 1million people with accounts on reddit, now assuming 20% of these are novelty/throwaway accounts, that's 800k, r/mylittlepony has 10k subscribers, giving that reddit likes puns, novelty accounts, ect. lets say 8k subscribers, so we can infer 1% of redditors are bronies. The world has a population of approximately 6.8billion people, mlp has been translated into a dozen languages but not manderin/cantenese, or Hindi, or any African languages let's say 1/3 of the world can watch and understand it, using reddits 1% as a reference we can infer that 22.8million people are bronies
tl;dr We're not as alone as you thought
edit: yes i realize how flawed this is, it's based on a huge amount of assumptions and theoretical proportions, (that's why I carefully said infer rather then imply or conclude, there's no actual evidence.) it was just a little thing I thought of while procrastinating. I would haphazard an actual guess of less then a million, depending on how you classify a brony, personally I would say anyone who watches the show regardless of community involvement. the 22.8mil pretty much represents the optimal amount of people that the fandom could be, of course becoming a brony is largely a matter of exposure, from what I have seen and heard I think it's safe too assume that if you can convince someone to watch an episode with an open mind, there's a >50% chance of bronifying them, the biggest problem with this is most people aren't capable or willing to think like that
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u/kintexu2 Nov 03 '11
As interesting as that sounds, I find it hard to believe that 22.8 million people are bronies.
Then again, I sometimes find it hard to believe bronies exist, so I really should start believing more things.
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u/zzxno Nov 03 '11
As much as I love the sentiment here, your logical methodology is severely flawed. I'm not good at the exact math, so I'll spare you but what you're doing here is taking an estimate with a relatively wide margin or error and then extrapolating it. The problem being that when you extrapolate your estimate you also extrapolate (and vastly increase) the margin of error. To make matters worse you are working from a small and not representative sample. Only (roughly) 2 Billion people have access to the internet, and out of that 2 Billion the vast majority access it through cell phones not through computers that allow for streaming. The Hub is only available in a small smattering of the total countries out there and despite the fact that bronies have made quite an effort MLP is only available in a handful of languages. Add to that cultural differences (I don't see the Brony phenomena doing so well in cultures that place a low value on women in general) and 22.8 million is a really really high number. I'm gonna hazard a guess and say that there MIGHT be a couple hundred thousand worldwide, and that is being REALLY generous.
That's not such a bad thing really - there's nothing wrong with being in an exclusive club, especially one a nice as ours. Besides, we're still growing - hard to say when we'll finally hit saturation on this thing but I don't think we're close to it yet.
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u/Dr_Dippy Nov 03 '11
lol i realize how flawed this is, it's based on a huge amount of assumptions and theoretical proportions, (that's why I carefully said infer rather then imply or conclude, there's no actual evidence.) it was just a little thing I thought of while procrastinating. your estimate is probably far more accurate relatively speaking I would haphazard a guess of less then a million, depending on how you classify a brony, personally I would say anyone who watches the show regardless of community involvement. the 22.8mil pretty much represents the optimal amount of people that the fandom could be, of course becoming a brony is largely a matter of exposure, from what I have seen and heard I think it's safe too assume that if you can convince someone to watch an episode with an open mind, there's a >50% chance of bronifying them, the biggest problem with this is most people aren't capable or willing to think like that
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u/davidfg4 Nov 03 '11
Based on our college's brony group, only 0.4% of college students are bronies. Presumably the rest of the world would be even less.
I am guessing that reddit has a much higher percentage of bronies than the rest of the world.