Blogging Statistics

I’m a bit late getting to this one, but Jason Fry wrote this blogging article for The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Among other sources, he talks about blogging statistics from a recent Gallup poll. The most disappointing numbers I saw in this are the combination of how only 9% of Internet users read blogs frequently and 66% never do. So despite all the buzz surrounding blogs, two-thirds of all Internet users still don’t bother to read a single one. Yikes.

Another sad but not exactly surprising statistic in Fry’s article: Although the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5.5 months, less than half those blogs are still getting posts three months after their creation. I’ve tried to keep this blog active with new posts, but I’m guilty of abandoning another blog I started a few months ago. I got tired of ranting about sports and seeing that nobody cared what I had to say. (I guess that just goes back to what Shel Israel and Robert Scoble always say about how you really need to be an authority on a topic to have a successful blog; I was just another obnoxious sports fan.)

Comments

[Dan B.]

Hey Joe,
I wonder how many folks are reading blogs but don't realize it. For example: I just found out this is a blog!
-Dan

[Ed Bott]

Dan beat me to the punch with his observation. In fact, Jason Fry made that same point in his story:

Blog posts show up in search-engine results, get emailed and IM'ed around, and wind up in Google News and news aggregators. Internet veterans may spy the factory-standard Blogger header or see Comments, Permalinks and Trackbacks and know they've landed on a blog, but this isn't obvious to everybody -- including, one imagines, Internet users being polled.

I'll be very happy when the fixation on blogging as a phenomenon goes away and it just becomes another tool for sharing information. e're already getting close. When I started blogging in 2002, the tools available were geeky and difficult to configure - Blogger was a little easier but still too underpowered for serious use. Today, just about anyone can start creating and sharing their ideas using a half-dozen different services, with no technical chops required.

Of course, it still takes work, dedication, and a little bit of luck to get a lot of readers. As you discovered!

[Erik Dafforn]

Dan found the key question. A little over a year ago, Pew said 62% of Internet users didn't know what a blog was. It's surely dropped since then, but probably not by much.

ps. Hi Joe.

[Joe Wikert]

Dan, Ed, Erik -- hi guys. I'm skeptical that the awareness and access numbers are much more favorable than the ones in the survey results. Sure, there are other ways blogging content can get distributed, but I don't know that I'd count much (any?) of that. I suppose I'm drawing a line between people who regularly visit at least one blog and those who may have been e-mailed an excerpt from one. After all, if I cut-and-paste a paragraph from a story in the NY Times and e-mail it to you, I don't think we should now count you as a NY Times reader. It also seems to me that most blogs I stumble across say something about the fact that it is indeed a blog, making it a bit harder to overlook that fact.

Before you guys trample me on this, realize that I agree with you that there are shades of gray here. Are there people who are visiting blogs on a regular basis who might answer "no" to the survey question? Absolutely. I just don't think the number is significant enough to dramatically change the overall results.

[Erik Dafforn]

If everyone's numbers are right, maybe we could look at it this way: Pew says 38% of internet users know what blogs are. Gallup says 33% of internet users read blogs (at least sometimes). So that means of all the people who know what blogs are, 87% read them (33/38). Those numbers seem a little more encouraging.

So maybe our job is to make sure people know what blogs are, and the readership will follow.

[Mitch Milam]

Joe,

I was in a Small Business Server user's group meeting at the local Microsoft office a couple of weeks ago and when one of the MS folks went through a list of SBS-related blogs to see who was reading what, I think less than 10% of the people in the room ( total 25+/- ) raised their hands.

And these are from people whose living depends upon keeping up with the technology and its surrounding issues.

I was a little shocked, but after seeing your post, I am no longer surprised.

Thanks, Mitch

[bill]

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[alfituri]

hi there, i am looking for a site which has statistic about blogs , can anyone help please
regards
my email is 05014886@napier.ac.uk
http://aalfituri.maktoobblog.com/

alfituri