I'm Brett Slatkin and this is where I write about programming and related topics. You can contact me here or view my projects.

25 July 2012

Happy Customer (an economist)

Excerpt from a blog post by John Horton, Staff Economist at oDesk:

[*] The Origin of "19% of the US Population has a LinkedIn profile" Number

In writing this blog post, I wanted to get an accurate number for what fraction of the US population has a LinkedIn profile. This number was proving hard to come by, so I decided to try a relatively new service launched by Google called Google Consumer Surveys. For 10 cents an answer, you can pose questions to a supposedly representative sample of US-based Internet users. You also get some of the respondent's basic demographics, such as inferred age, gender and income. I launched a one question survey and got 1511 responses in less than a day. The screenshot below shows the main results, but it also includes some neat tools for looking at the data in different ways. I made the survey public---check it out here. I'm quite pleased with the service and plan to use it again.
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