The demographics of survey respondents.
December 9, 2025 by Josiah Zoodsma and Jesse Weisz in Analysis, News
Note: If possible, please use Google Chrome to view this article. Some browsers, like Firefox, do not display the charts correctly.
Welcome to the first of a series of offseason articles documenting the findings from the 2025 FAR/Ultiworld Fandom Survey!
What is the Fandom Survey?
At its onset in 2022, the Fandom Survey was a relatively modest endeavor to understand who fans root for and what affects their fandom. Currently in its fourth year, the Fandom Survey has expanded in scope. The Fandom Survey is run by the team at First Available Research (FAR), and amounts to a census of, and for, the disc golf community.
Broadly, the goal of the Fandom Survey is to better understand the disc golf community and help guide the sport we love forward in a data-driven way. To help achieve this goal, the Fandom Survey partnered with the PDGA and the DGPT to develop and distribute the survey, ensuring the governing bodies of our sport are actively engaged with the survey’s findings. More information about the team at FAR, our mission, and the Fandom Survey can be found at discgolfsurvey.com.
The purpose of this initial article is to share who comprises the disc golf community that participated in the 2025 FAR/Ultiworld Fandom Survey and set the foundation for all future articles in this series. We will first summarize the demographics of the survey respondents and how they discovered the survey, as this information is critical to our interpretation of future results. We strive to have our survey be as representative of the entire disc golf community as possible; however, we know the collected data is likely skewed toward people who are online, follow one of the media sources that shared a survey link, and were willing to take a survey.
The Fandom Survey was open to responses for just over one month this year (7/22/25 – 8/25/25). In the context of the professional disc golf season, the survey opened prior to PDGA Pro Worlds and closed after the Open at Idlewild. In total, more than 10,000 survey respondents began the 2025 Fandom Survey, and over 8,500 completed the entire survey! This is more than a 30% increase in responses from last year!
Who were the respondents from the 2025 Fandom Survey?
Note: for all graphs included in this and future articles, you can hover your cursor over the graphs (or tap with your finger) to get additional information about each group.
Similar to last year, the largest portion of respondents found the Fandom Survey through DGN live coverage. In 2025, the survey was also promoted through the PDGA, Disc Golf Valley, and various disc golf podcasts, disc golf newsletters, and local social media groups. Our diverse and partnered promotion strategy allows us to reach a broader audience, with our goal of capturing a more representative sample of the entire disc golf community each year.
So who were the survey respondents?
Birth Year of Survey Respondents
We had survey respondents as young as 5 and as old as 83 take the survey this year! The average age of respondents was 40 years old, with 43.5% of respondents falling into the Millennial category (29 to 44 years old).
Gender Identity of Survey Respondents
6.6% of the survey respondents identified as women, which is approximately equal to the percentage of PDGA members who are women (7% – PDGA Demographics).
Regional Representation of Respondents
73.4% of respondents were from the United States, with Europeans accounting for the bulk of the non-US respondents. Outside of these groupings, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were the next most represented countries. In total, 33 nations had multiple respondents take the survey.
Among US respondents, all 50 states were represented in this year’s survey, with the most represented states being Texas, Michigan, California, and North Carolina. This is the same as from 2024, and these are also the four states with the most PDGA members.
27 European countries had at least one survey respondent. Finland, Sweden, and Norway combined for over 75% of all European respondents.
68.7% of survey respondents were PDGA members, with 56.1% of survey respondents being active PDGA members.
67.1% of survey respondents have been DGN subscribers before, with 56.2% of survey respondents being active DGN subscribers
What was included in the 2025 Fandom Survey?
Respondents of the 2025 Fandom Survey answered an array of questions related to five main topics:
- Player Perceptions: What does the disc golf community think of professional players?
- Entertainment from the Sport: How does the disc golf community prefer to engage with the sport as a fan?
- Engagement with the Sport: How does the disc golf community prefer to engage with the sport as a player?
- Sponsor Perceptions: How does the disc golf community view the companies that sponsor disc golf?
- Participant Profile: Who is the disc golf community?
Similar to last year, the 2025 Fandom Survey used personalized surveys for all respondents. All questions were filtered based on a respondent’s previous answers. For example, only respondents who indicated that they were PDGA members were asked about their view on current PDGA membership benefits. In this way, we were able to remove impartial or non-applicable respondents from specific questions throughout the survey, and every respondent only spent their time answering the questions that were the most applicable to them.
Additionally, survey respondents were able to choose the length of the survey they were willing to take:
All five of the main topics for the Fandom Survey were included in each survey, regardless of the length of the survey chosen. However, respondents who indicated that they had more time to take a longer survey were given more follow-up questions on various topics. For example, pertaining to the consumption of disc golf content on other social media platforms:
- All survey respondents were asked: “Who is your favorite disc manufacturer?”
- Only survey respondents who indicated they wanted a longer survey were asked: “Was this your favorite disc golf manufacturer last year?”
In this way, all surveys had the same breadth of topics, but longer surveys had greater depth. Excitingly, over half of all respondents opted for the longest survey! Because of this survey personalization, we will diligently share the number of respondents in all of our graphics wherever possible, as it varies from question to question.
We are excited to share our analysis of all of this great content in the upcoming articles – stay tuned!
- If you are interested in learning more about the team and research goals at First Available Research, click here!
- If you want to read articles from last year’s Fandom Survey, click here!
- If you want to be notified of the publication of future articles in this series and/or want to take future disc golf surveys from our group, click here!
- If you have any questions, comments or mailbag topics for future articles, submit them here!
Special thanks to the Fandom Survey’s editor, Karl Lamothe.
Throughout the offseason, we will be publishing more articles showcasing the results of the 2025 Fandom Survey. Here are the articles that have been published so far:
- The Survey Itself & Who Took It
- Which Pros Do We Root For and Against
- What Drives Fans to Root for Certain Players?
- How Fans Feel about Disc Manufacturers
- How Fans Feel about Disc Golf Media (Part 1)
- How Fans Feel about Disc Golf Media (Part 2)
- The Most Popular Discs
- Disc Golf Purchasing Trends
- Last Questions and Final Thoughts
Links for the 2024, 2023, and 2022 Fandom Series articles can be found here.
