Posted on 08/08/2005 4:13:34 PM PDT by kristinn
U.S. blog readership in the first quarter jumped 45 percent to 49.5 million people, or one-sixth of the total U.S. population, a report said Monday, suggesting the blogosphere is becoming increasingly alluring to online advertisers.
The increase means 30 percent of U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the quarter, according to the comScore Media Metrix report.
In the quarter, Google’s Blogspot had 19 million unique visitors, which comScore noted was more than big mainstream media sites NYTimes.com, USAToday.com, and WashingtonPost.com. However, these visitors were spread around Blogspot’s millions of individual sites.
As far as advertisers are concerned, blog readers are a desirable demographic—young, wealthy, likely to shop online, and with high-speed Internet connections. They visit 77 percent more web pages than the average Internet user.
The most popular blogs were Free Republic with 3.6 million visitors, Drudge Report with 2.3 million, Fleshbot (a Gawker Media blog) with 1.2 million, followed by Gawker and Fark, both with 1.1 million. Regularly updated blogs won a huge portion of the overall visits. Drudge Report alone had 44.3 million visits.
Most popular were political blogs followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs, and blogs written by women, comScore noted.
However, blog readership tails off rather quickly, with the majority of blogs having under 100 visitors a day, according to Rick Bruner, director of research for DoubleClick, who co-authored the comScore report.
The comScore data does not address these smaller blogs as many are merged with all the other blogs hosted by the same domain, as in the case of Six Apart’s TypePad. Others simply did not make the cut, as the list was limited to the Top 400 most-trafficked blog domains. All but one of the blog domains used in the report had more than 1,000 unique visitors.
Down the Food Chain
In Mr. Bruner’s opinion, the high price of advertising on top sites will lead companies to “start looking deeper down the food chain for more affordable advertising.” He estimated that about half of total page views on the Internet are to small sites.
Last week, Technorati announced that it had measured 14.2 million blogs, 55 percent of them active, about double the amount in March. The company counted 900,000 new posts per day in July, nearly double the amount in January (see Blogs: 900,000 Posts a Day).
Mr. Bruner said that the Technorati numbers give credence to comScore’s report. But, he said, “They’re not really comparable. Technorati can spider links, but they can’t actually look at traffic.”
An international report that combines blog creation with blog readerships of all sizes has yet to be completed.
The comScore report was sponsored by Six Apart and blog network Gawker Media.
Great news!
More power each day to expose the MSM Mediots as lying lunatics.
No, it's not a blog.
I always call us an online political and news forum.
FR is an online political and news forum. Ehh, too wordy.
FR is #1 blog. Now that sounds better.
IPO next month...LOL
I wonder who has the record here? And what are his/her statistics?
Fyi and good news to spread.
Dumb Question.....Where do you get your stats?
I'd much rather see him have advertiser money. Thoughts?
"Total # visits:FR 5,848,000"
If a lot of people are like me I only count for 1 visit since I have FR open on my computer 24/7 but spend a lot of hours here every day.
(Bettin' I'm not the first to say it; but I feel compelled:)
Well, two out of two ain't bad.
Note to self... No Vanities! ;-)"
And note to self, always use spell check. lol
It was a dark and stromy night...;-)
See my tagline
bump
You know that at least half of those DU hits are surfers following a "can you believe what these lunatics are saying?" link.
All 50 of them.
Where are the Dummies ranked?
What's your #'s Howlin?
WOO-Hoo!!! Way to go, JIM!!! :)
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