Blog Statistics

A general public survey conducted by Steve Rubel in April 2005 indicated that 30% of those surveyed read blogs. The majority, 52% of those surveyed, said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists, while 27% did not express an opinion. A minority, 39%, said that they found blogs less credible than newspaper articles; however, an additional 32% said they either did not know or had no opinion.

In 2003, it has been estimated that there were 7,000 Corporate Blogs and over 15,000 just six months later. Today, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) estimates there are 2,364,621, with 1,635,817 in English.

“50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1-in-6 of the total U.S. population.” – Harvard Business School

“More than 51% of journalists use blogs regularly and 28% rely on them to help their day-to-day reporting duties.” – comScore

The number of blogs Technorati tracks has doubled every 5 months for the last 20 months and should be tracking 30 million (blogs) by January 2006, discovering 30-to-40,000 blogs daily.

Technorati is the leading Blog Analyst Firm. It invited over 30,000 subscribers to its electronic newsletter to participate in the study. Bloggers were also encouraged to take the study through blog posts on Technorati's website. The online study was open for one week; 18 questions; 3 open-ended. There were 821 respondents. There is a +/- 3% margin of error.

See the results of the Technoradi Blog Survery 2005 at
https://extranet.edelman.com/bloggerstudy/Default.aspx

Primary Reasons People Blog


How often do you post?


There was not a huge difference between blogs receiving high and low traffic. For example - blogs receiving 60 visits per day had an average visit length of 100 seconds which was almost the same as blogs averaging 2000 visits a day (averaging 97 seconds). 97 seconds is not a very long time. It is quite disillusioning to realize that after slaving over a post for hours that it is likely to be skimmed over in less than two minutes).
- the great majority of bloggers identify themselves on their sites: 55% of respondents provide their real names on their blogs; another 20% provide some variant of the real name (first name only, first name and initial of surname, a pseudonym friends would know, etc.)

- 76% of bloggers do not limit access (i.e. readership) to their entries in any way

- 36% of respondents have gotten in trouble because of things they have written on their blogs

- 34% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in trouble with family and friends

- 12% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in legal or professional problems because of things they wrote on their blogs

- when blogging about people they know personally: 66% of respondents almost never asked permission to do so; whereas, only 9% said they never blogged about people they knew personally.

- 83% of respondents characterized their entries as personal ramblings whereas 20% said they mostly publish lists of useful/interesting links (respondents could check multiple options for this answer). This indicates that the nature of blogs might be changing from being mostly lists of links to becoming sites that contain more personal stories and commentaries.