Blogs as a medium proliferated the internet with great speed and continue to do so. Technorati puts the number of existing blogs some where around 19 million with a new blog being created every second. The big question is who actually reads all this stuff? Chances are, it’s your employees.
AdAge recently put an analysis together with a lot of interesting points on just how much time workers are reading blogs instead of doing work. They estimate workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.
They point out in the article most employers expect a modest amount of non-productive behavior because it’s the cost of doing business. The problem seems to stem from the fact bloggers read and respond to blogs in addition to the occasional surfing for news or other activities. It’s directly cutting into work time.
AdAge said 35 million workers or one in four visit blogs and on average spent 3.5 hours or roughly 9% of the workweek doing the blog thing. Blogging averages 40 minutes a day. They said time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs.
AdAge quoted Blogads founder Henry Copeland saying, “Traffic rockets at 8 a.m. EST, peaks at 5 p.m. EST and then slides downward until L.A. leaves the office. You see the same thing in the collapse of traffic on weekends. Bottom line: At work, people can’t watch TV or prop up their feet and read a newspaper, but they sure do read blogs.”
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
