Remember when we told you about the survey being taken of people who download their comics from the various filesharing networks? Well, the results are in, and they’re somewhat interesting (especially with the anti-downloading open letter that seems to be going around), if a bit difficult to follow. Bittorrent is far and away the most popular program used, which was probably to be expected. Among the results I found the most interesting are the fact that there’s actually more interest, even if it’s just a slight one, in comics from the 90s and 80s than in the most recent releases. Even comics from the 70s run neck-and-neck with current comics. Also, superhero comics aren’t really leading the pack by a wide margin either, indicating either that there’s more of an audience for the non- Big Two books than most storeowners realize, or the people online tend to have a more varied taste than the non-wired fans.

Another number that really jumps out at me is the largest age group involved in scanning and downloading comics. By a wide margin, it was 20-25 year olds, which plays against the commonly accepted idea over the last decade that no kids are reading comics. Yes, 20-25 is a young adult age and not teenagers, but ten years ago, people were constantly lamenting the fact that only grown fanboys were reading comics…when these guys and gals were 10-15. Again, some of this may be explained away by the fact that generally people in that age bracket are a bit more secure in dealing with technology than in the older rackets, but 25-30 (the second highest group, 2/3 the size of the 20-25 year old group) don’t exactly tend to be luddites.

Of course, this is just a small sampling of downloaders involved in a survey that was put together by someone in their spare time. Who knows what the results would be in a more scientific survey. Something the industry should think about, probably, because the information presented in this one has some interesting tendencies indicated.

Lots more numbers to mull over here.

General