Reddit Is More Popular with Latinos Than Any Other Ethnic Group - Pew

On July 3, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which tracks social trends about the internet and technology, released a study focused purely on the social news and viral website Reddit. The study found, among other things, that a significantly higher proportion of Hispanics use Reddit, compared with White and Black Non-Hispanics.

Overall, Pew's study on Reddit found that six percent of all adults who use the internet use Reddit. Reddit is a social news and entertainment website where users post stories, images, videos, and news articles. Other Reddit users can comment on posts and vote submissions up or down for more or less visibility. The site is known for finding or creating viral content, and popular viral news sites often write about things that are rising in popularity on Reddit. The site is also known for carrying out question and answer sessions with celebrities or newsmakers, which are called "Ask Me Anything," or AMA.

Age, Gender and Reddit

This is Pew's first survey examining Reddit by itself, and extensive polling by Pew found that the user-generated social news site is most popular, perhaps unsurprisingly, with young men. Of the Pew's cross-section of age and gender from their study, a total of 15 percent of men aged 18 to 29 had used Reddit, compared with just 5 percent of women in the same age range.

Older people tended not to use Reddit as readily either. Also unsurprising, the smallest percentage of Reddit users in the age/gender analysis were adults aged 65 or older, with just three percent of men that age having visited the site and only one percent of women "Redditors" at or above the age of 65. In the middle, eight percent of men 30 to 49 years old and five percent of women in that age bracket were Reddit users. Finally, three percent and two percent of men and women, respectively, aged 50 to 64 were Reddit users.

Hispanics and Reddit

When Pew broke down the results further into demographic groups, such as location, educational attainment, economic standing, and ethnicity, some interesting results followed. Reddit users were split by Pew into White (Non-Hispanic), Black (Non-Hispanic) and Hispanic groups. Though there are higher numbers of Whites who use Reddit (because there was a higher percentage of Whites surveyed) the highest percentage of Reddit use by ethnicity was - by far - Hispanics.

While White (Non-Hispanic) and Black (Non-Hispanic) categories of the race/ethnicity section in Pew's results were five percent and four percent, respectively, 11 percent of Hispanic people surveyed say they have used Reddit. In mathematical terms, this is a statistically significant difference that cannot be reduced to random error or sample size.

Hispanics and Social Media

This makes Reddit the site that is most popular with Latino respondents, according to Pew's recent polls on social media. The Pew Research Center, in February, studied other social media sites and services, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, but none of those individual sites stood out as much as Reddit did, as far as Latino involvement.

However, that study also looked at social networking sites in general, and found that 72 percent of Hispanics use social media - also the highest percentage among ethnic groups and higher than the national average, though the percentage is not as far and away higher than others, as with Latino Reddit use.

Just last month, another Pew Internet and American Life survey found that Hispanics owned smartphones at a higher rate than the national average. Sixty percent of Hispanic adults owned smartphones, four percent higher than the 56 percent overall smartphone ownership in America.

Hispanics, therefore, are not only a growing community in America, but also online, in social media, and in mobile access to those services, which is, itself, the fastest growing sector of technology, according to recent reports. Pew's surveys are conducted on adults aged 18 and older in English and Spanish by phone. The Reddit survey asked more than 2,250 adults about their use of Reddit, along with questions about age, income, education, residence, and race. The full Pew survey results on Reddit use can be found here.