Every once and a while a trend comes along that surprises you with its popularity – anyone remember American Gladiator? What about Robot Wars? The latest iteration of this vein is UFC: Ulitimate Fighting Championships. Matches are available for viewing on Pay-Per-View television, or online, and It’s been steadily picking up steam in the past few months. The chart below shows daily traffic to the site, which more than doubles on days of highly publicized matches. On July 9, 2006 UFC.com reached a rank of 121 by market share of visits among all sites, receiving a greater share of visits than sites like World Wrestling Entertainment.

What’s most interesting to me about UFC is understanding who’s visiting the site. Hitwise/Claritas PRZIM NE Segmentation shows that the largest social group visiting UFC for the four weeks ending 7/8/06 was “Rustic Living,” which accounted for 14.7% of visitors to the site. Rustic Living is comprised of residents of rural areas and small towns who have modest incomes and typically blue collar occupations, and they were 54% more likely to visit UFC than the average Internet user. Let’s drill down further for descriptions from Claritas of the individual PRIZM NE segments that make up the largest percentage of visitors to UFC:
Young & Rustic – 6.1% of UFC traffic, 2.7% of Internet population

Like the soap opera that inspired its nickname, Young & Rustic is composed of young, restless singles. Unlike the glitzy soap denizens, however, these folks tend to be lower income, high school-educated and live in tiny apartments in the nation’s exurban towns. With their service industry jobs and modest incomes, these folks still try to fashion fast-paced lifestyles centered on sports, cars and dating.

They are more likely to go to auto racing, watch professional wrestling, watch soap operas, and live in rural communities in Georgia and Kansas than the general population.

Red, White and Blues - 4.3% of UFC traffic, 2.1% of Internet population

The residents of Red, White & Blues typically live in exurban towns rapidly morphing into bedroom suburbs. Their streets feature new fast-food restaurants, and locals have recently celebrated the arrival of chains like Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and Payless Shoes. Middle-aged, high school educated and lower-middle class, these folks tend to have solid, blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, milling and construction.

They are more likely to order from HSN, go horseback riding, and own an outboard motor than the general population.
Crossroads Viillagers – 3.8% of visitors to UFC, 2.6% of Internet population

With a population of middle-aged, blue-collar couples and families, Crossroads Villagers is a classic rural lifestyle. Residents are high school-educated, with lower-middle incomes and modest housing; one-quarter live in mobile homes. And there’s an air of self-reliance in these households as Crossroads Villagers help put food on the table through fishing, gardening and hunting.

These are my people and just to prove the accuracy of PRIZM NE segmentation, the data tells me that Crossroads Villagers are more likely to own a motor home (yes we did, and lived in it for a while), order from Publisher’s Clearing House (I collected the stamps as child), have a satellite dish (we didn’t have a TV because we only got one channel and satellite dishes were too large and too expensive back then), and order from Reader’s Digest (I was obsessed with Laughter the Best Medicine, Life in these United States, and All in a Day’s Work when I was about 11), and do woodworking (my father built our house himself).
It can be very valuable to be able to segment visitors to a site by lifestyle characteristics, particularly for finding affiliates and advertising partners. Clearly UFC and Banana Republic would not be a good match!