It’s stats time again regarding blogging. Reuters is reporting new findings released today by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on Americans’ activities with blogs that indicate a number of interesting things.
For starters, Reuters says, many people see blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media. Most bloggers do so as a hobby rather than as a vocation, with 77 percent of them saying they post to express themselves creatively rather than to get noticed or paid.
Some specifics [with my comments in square brackets]:
- 37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topic, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.
- About 8 percent of US internet users (12 million adults) keep a blog according to the report. Some 39 percent of US web users (57 million adults) read them, the researchers said. [I wonder what the difference is between “internet users” and “web users”?]
- US bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and are more racially diverse than the web population in general: 40 percent are non-white.
- About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism. [The rise of the “citizen journalist.”]
- Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.
- More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly.
- 11 percent said they post corrections.
- 61 percent said they rarely or never get permission to use copyrighted material. [My emphasis. That’s not good and, if a trend, pretty alarming.]
- 55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym. [That’s a much larger number than I imagined.]
- Nearly 90 percent invite comments from other readers. [Clearly, engaging with visitors is an important aspect of blogging to most people.]
- Four out of five blogs use text, while 72 percent display photos and audio links play on 30 percent of blogs. [I think we will see more multimedia aspects in blogs as more people discover what you can easily do these days in this regard with every blog platform.]
- 82 percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. 3 percent say they have quit. [That doesn’t seem to match Technorati’s numbers which say that only 55 percent are still posting after six months. Or is that semantic hair-splitting?]
The report is now on the Pew site.
What would be great, too, is to see similar research for Europe, in particular the larger countries like the UK, France and Germany. Does anyone know of any recent stats?
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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
