State of the Blogosphere

I’ve read the Comcast report, I’ve also read Jason Colacanis’s challenge to the figures.

WIth a finding that 30% of the US internet population, close to 50 million people, have visited a blog (even if they do not realise it’s a blog) then it has to have interest to the monetizers if the internet, especially given the summarised findings of the type of vistors.

  • Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in Q1 2005, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
  • Of 400 of the largest blogs observed, segmented by eight (non-exclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
  • Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
  • Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online

    The challenge comes around the detail (in the pdf report), looking at the visits/visitors to the various blogs. Jason looks closely at his company’s blogs vs that of Nick Denton’s (who sponsored the report) and finds worrying discrepancies that he cannot reconcile with what he knows from other sources about traffic figures. The debate seems set to continue.

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