Introducing Universe figures

You might have noticed that in table view, we’ve recently introduced a new figure called Universe (millions) alongside the response count.

This is simply a projection of how many people, in real world numbers, our sample equates to.

For example, in the table above we see that 1158 males in all 18 markets of our sample would pay for online sports hi-lights.
Now if we scale that figure to real world numbers it would give you 75 million males (from our sample of active online users) are willing to pay for an online sports highlights service. It’s quite an impressive number to put in a presentation.

How do we calculate it?

First of all, we collect from independent sources the total number of active internet users in each country, adding them all together we have a total of 1,046,000,000 internet users in the 18 markets of our sample.

With a simple proportion we then calculate that, on average, each of our 17,500 respondents represents 59,798 people in real world numbers.

Now, the actual procedure is slightly more complex because it is done on a country basis to take into account differences in the population of each country. For example, each respondent in the Netherlands represents 17,911 Dutch web users while each respondent in China represents more than 300,000 Chinese web users but the main concept is the same.

What about the totals?

You may notice that in the above table the totals go well above 100%. This happens because respondents could select more than one option in that question. You can find details of which questions allow single or multiple answers in our Categories and Questions document.

In this case, the total percentage (300%) means that on average male respondents selected 3 options each. The responses total is the total number of options clicked by all respondents in that question.
If you look at the total male respondents in that table and divide it by 3 you will get the total male sample for that block of questions which is 9346.