Mediaboss Marketing

There's this thing happening online. Communities of men are springing up and communicating their likes and dislikes, their favorite brands of organic shave gel and vintage leather tote bags, the way a certain pair of pants manages to look both dashing and casual, instructions on how to wear one's best collar. Maybe they're talking about things they want to buy; maybe they're talking about things they simply appreciate. Maybe they're asking for advice, or telling personal stories. This new movement, if we can go so far (and we think we can) as to call it that, is not about women, nor about traditional male-bonding subjects like sports or business or even porn. It's about stuff. Men are sharing about stuff. Whatever stuff it is that they want to share about.

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Men and women have both come a long way since the restrained (or repressed) time of the pre-computer 1950s. As the Internet was born and opened up all kinds of opportunities for unprecedented virtual communications, women blazed the trail gamely, taking to sites like Facebook and Pinterest as if they were natural environments, hardly different from more traditional venues like tea parties or book clubs. Men generally trailed a bit behind -- they currently number at about 45 percent of Facebook's users; women are even more so the dominant gender on Pinterest. The Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield reports that, per the most recentQuantcaststatistics,men make up 49 percent of web users, and women 51 percent, but they spend time in different places. In a 2009 Pew survey, 50 percent of women said they had used social networks compared to just 42 percent of men. A more recent Comscore study found that while women spent 16.3 percent of their time online with social networks, the number for men was only 11.7 percent.

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Using Quantcastdata forTumblr,TwitterandFacebook,information fromComscorefor Pinterest, and stats provided to The Atlantic Wire by Reddit and Gentlemint, Greenfield put together a gender breakdown of the social Web:

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According to a 2010 article byJenna GoudreauinForbes, "Experts believe the difference between how men and women operate online mirror their motivations offline. While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status." But this appears to be changing to some degree. On Reddit, on Gentlement, and even on Pinterest, where the hashtag #bropin has been adopted to indicate more guy-centric territory, there appears to be a shift from those former expectations about how men are using the Internet. It's not all guys pouring beers down their pants -- though sometimes it is. It's also, on Pinterest, breakup tips andChristopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are. On Gentlemint, there are beautiful photos of handlebar mustaches as coffee foam art, recipes for the perfect mac and cheese, and even affirmations of a sort. Reddit includes threads focused on adorable animals, health tips like "some personal lessons learned from 3 months of attempts at getting healthy," and discussions about cool shoes. Definitely, the discussions men are having online are more wide-ranging than ever.

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The Internet Is Where Bros Learn to Share