First, almost exactly half of respondants had no interest at all in the convention with another 15% "not very interested." I have to admit that I am genuinely surprised those numbers are that low. We're looking at a full third of the US population who says they have at least some interest in the convention. Not surprisingly, that third tends to skew towards men, age 18-34 but that's still a much heftier group than I woulld've guessed. If this same survey had been done twenty years ago, I can almost guarantee those numbers would've been small enough to almost seen as rounding errors.
What's not surprising because it tracks pretty closely with anecdotal information I expect most of us have seen/heard over the last several years, movies are the biggest draw of the con among those who responded they were interested. Followed closely by TV, video games, and celebrity appearances. Only about 45% of respondants expressed and interest in comics. Although muddying that number slightly is that YouGov offered "anime and manga" as a seperate category, but since people could select multiple interests and it was all self-selected, we don't know how many manga fans also selected "comics" because "manga are comics" or how many were interested in anime but not manga. So it's possible that 45% could potentially be higher, depending on how people defined things. But even if you want to inlude some kind of manga 'bump' to show that yes, over half people are interested in some aspect of comics from Comic-Con, that's almost certainly still less than the number interested in movies.
(As an aside, I don't see any information about the level of confidence they offer with any of these numbers and/or what kind of margin of error they're considering. They do claim to have gotten results back from a group that reflects a reprsentation of US adults, broken down by age, race, gender, education, and region but they don't offer any details beyond that as far as I can tell.)
Also not surprising, about two-thirds of people get news and updates about the convention through social media primarily and half of those through friends and family specifically. Given how few outlets cover the convention at all (beyond an obligatory passing mention that it's happening) and the outlets that do show up can only send a handful of people at most, there's inherently going to be a LOT more people on the convention floor talking about what they're doing via social media. You can read about ALL the coverage by following a few hashtags, whereas if you just look at a news site, you're going to only get few highlights from the one or two or three people they have reporting.
Anyway, no huge surprises, I don't think. Most of it just puts some data to anecdotal observations with the possible exception of the overall reach. Always good to confirm what you think is going on, though, so I absolutely welcome seeing this, even if it's perhaps not as in-depth or detailed as I'd like.
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