Bob, I guess any visitor of FTT can reach the survey link. I'm asking just out of curiosity, how do you know if the survey is taken just by members?
The short answer is that there is no way to know if the survey is taken just by members. The link is available only on the FTT site. It's open to anyone who can find the link. If visitors take the survey, that's fine too. It's specifically a question about the preferences of users of this site.
What's the value of it? My interest in the question was piqued by a member's post welcoming a new member. It stated that FTT was mostly cigar people. For a longstanding member like yourself, having read many years of posts, it's easy to have a sense of how the survey may come out. But so far (with 34 participants), the percentage of pipe smokers (32%) is higher than I would have expected. I also suspected that cigarette smokers would be greater than cigar smokers, which is not presently the case.
While Don uses, I'm sure, sales metrics to apportion his resources, the survey might offer some additional insight.
SAMHSA 2001 NHSDA Survey: Tobacco Use. September 17 said:
According to the 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), about 66.5 million Americans reported past month use of a tobacco product, or 29.5 percent of the population aged 12 and over. Specifically, 24.9 percent of that population smoked cigarettes, while 5.4% used cigars, 1.0% smoked pipes, and 3.2% used smokeless tobacco.
http://www.samhsa.gov/oas/nhsda/2k1nhsda/vol1/Chapter4.htm
If we use a base of 29.5% of the population (US), then do the math for all smokers:
- cigarettes: ~84%
- cigars: ~18%
- pipe: ~3%
- smokeless: ~11%
These are very different numbers than what we are seeing in the FTT survey, though I'm not sure of the SAMHSA methodology. They may have simply asked what the subject used last, which is not the same question as the FTT survey asks. Also, most tobacco users in the US have no interest in actually making the tobacco products that they use.
So, I'm curious how this will turn out.
Bob