“16Personalities” is drawing attention among Gen Z: Its growing popularity is due to “job-hunting” and “social media”?

Hello! I'm Haru, a freshman at Waseda University.
I'm an active member of my university's academic on-campus club "Marketing Study Group," and as an intern, I'm conducting research and writing MANAMINA articles. Be sure to read until the end! Thank you!

16Personalities is a personality test that categorizes personalities and a person's character from 16 personality types based on the answers given in a questionnaire of 93 questions. You can take the test for free on their official website.

This figure below exhibits the changes in the number of people visiting the 16Personalities website (https://www.16personalities.com), and you can see that the traffic has started to increase at the beginning of 2023. What kind of people are visiting their website?
We will study the data using VALUES' online behavioral data analytics tool "Dockpit," which allows you to analyze competitor websites and research trends based on behavioral data that is updated monthly, all accessible within a browser.

Now let's look at the user attributes of the people visiting the 16Personalities website.

Starting with gender, the male-to-female ratio is approximately 4:6, indicating that there are more female users than male users.

Next, for age, 50% are in their 20s, with young people accounting for the majority.

Furthermore, if you look at the annual household income, you can see that it is slightly lower than the average among Internet users as a whole.

From the above, it can be seen that many people in their 20s, women, and people with an annual household income slightly lower than the average use 16Personalities. In other words,

Females who have just started working or are students = Generation Z women
are the primary users of 16Personalities

Why does this segment use 16Personalities the most?

Next, we will investigate why Gen Z women are the main users. For the analysis, we used online behavioral data and questionnaire data, and use VALUES' analytics tool "story bank" (only available in Japanese) that can aggregate the movements before and after specific online behaviors as well as user attributes among target users.

The following data is the ranking of websites viewed by 16Personalities users in the 180 minutes before and after their visit.

Specifically, No.2 "Mochilabo," No.3 "Shutsutsu no Kyokasho," No.5 "arweb" and No.8 "NET ViVi" are ranked in, and from this, we can see that

Job-hunting websites and beauty websites

are the most popular.
Let's take a look at the ranking of popular apps used among 16Personalities visitors as well.

Camera apps and photo-editing apps such as No.2 “Meitu” and No.6 “SNOW” ranked high.
Based on the above, it can be said that visitors of the 16Personalities website use the diagnosis results for

• self-analysis for job-hunting
• creating profiles/bios for their social media, etc.

In this research, I investigated the 16Personalities personality test, which is becoming popular among the public. The findings are that

(1) Gen Z women are considered to be its main users
(2) The results of the personality test are used for job-hunting and social media purposes

I, too, am Generation Z, and many people around me are doing self-diagnostics and posting them on social media. Letting others know your personality may have a role in deepening relationships.

However, it may not be as well known to the public yet. Considering that celebrities are talking about it on social media, I think it will become more popular in the future. It is definitely worth keeping an eye on!

▼Data from Dockpit was used in this case study. Dockpit is an online behavior analytics tool provided by VALUES, Inc., and it allows you to access online behavioral data (updated monthly) via your browser so you can research competitor websites and investigate trends. There is a FREE version of Dockpit, so if you are interested in using it, please register below.