BLOGGERS, YOUR AUDIENCE AWAITS (analysis of blogosphere audience size)

"how to save the world" blog at Salon.com ^ | January 4, 2005 | Dave Pollard

[baseball_fan]

A brand new Pew survey of Internet users lets bloggers track the growing audience for their writing. The survey suggests that the total online potential audience (regular Internet users) has reached 40% of the US population, and that 7% of them (8 million) have created a weblog at some time and 27% (32 million Americans) claim to read weblogs. Other research indicates that, excluding the exploding Chinese market, US blog readership is about 40% of global blog readership, which means that the blog writer now has a target audience of 80 million readers worldwide. Of that number, 6 million Americans (and perhaps 15 million worldwide) subscribe to one or more blogs through RSS feeds. About 40% of blog readers have posted comments on blogs.

Other surveys monitored by Phil Wolff's Blogcount suggest the number of regular Internet users who maintain active blogs is closer to 2% of regular Internet users (2 million Americans, perhaps 5 million globally), and that global blog readership including China is as high as 110 million. These surveys also indicate that the average blog reader stays only 90 seconds per page, and only 40 seconds per page on 'A-list' blogs.

But what's the real competition out there? Extrapolating some work I did last year...snip

[baseball_fan]

"Now let's look at attention in aggregate. All US dailies combined are getting an aggregate of 12.5 million hours of reader attention per day. The blogosphere combined is getting an aggregate of 1.0 million hours of reader attention per day, and that's doubling every 18 months, and we haven't started to bridge the digital divide yet, where 80% of our potential audience lies."

Here is his latest update on the data:

The Long Tail: A-Listers Maybe Not So Powerful After All

"A number of readers asked me how I computed the data in my recent Bloggers, Your Audience Awaits post. People were especially surprised at my computation that only 2,000 blogs have an average of over 1,000 page-views per day. Here is the data I published in that analysis:"

Still trying to absorb the details and what it all means. Includes some sources to those trying to measure such things.