35.3 Million Blogs–Who Reads Them?

The State of the Blogosphere

In his quarterly State of the Blogosphere report, David Sifry CEO of Technorati, Search Engine and Blog Index, reported that Technorati now indexes 35.3 million blogs, that the number of blogs doubles every six months, and that the blogosphere is now over 60 times larger than it was only 3 years ago. Take a moment to digest that.

A new weblog is created every second of every day. As I type this sentence some 10 or 20 new weblogs have come into being. 50,000 blog posts like this one are written every hour.

The world is changing. The choice is to learn to navigate it or watch it as it moves away.

Who Reads Those Weblogs?

It’s already been agreed that no one person could possibly read all of the content being created at this breakneck speed. Here are the facts from a new report from Comscore, and sponsored in part by SixApart and Gawker Media as made public via ClickZ Network.

• Fifty million Americans, or 30 percent of all American Internet users, visited a blog in the first quarter of 2005 that’s increased by 45 percent from the first quarter of 2004.
• The average blog reader viewed 77 percent more pages than the average Internet user (16,000 versus 9,000 for the quarter).
• Blog readers average 23 hours online per week, compared to 13 hours spent by non-blog reading Internet users.
• Blog readers are 11 percent more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of or greater than $75,000.
• Blog readers are also 11 percent more likely to visit the Web over broadband, rather than dial up.
• Blog readers tend to make more online purchases and to spend more when they do.

“Blog readers are an attractive audience to advertisers: they are more likely young, wealthy, on broadband, and spend significantly online,” said Rick Bruner, co-author of the report. Bruner has since joined DoubleClick as research director.

There are many statements within these statistics that could explain the reasons that the mainstream media wishes to relegate the activity of blogging to the lower euphemistic term of “citizen journalist,” originally coined with some respect, but now used to keep the line between the “trained professional” and the untrained, lesser masses clear.

Some think it is in the benefit of the mainstream media to ignore any success that bloggers have and any credentials they might own or acquire. Unfortunately to pursue this benefit is short-sighted. Far more beneficial would be to join in and, as the BBC has done, incorporate blogging in their economic model.

The key audience — the prize demographic — is who reads them.

Liz Strauss