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, Googles 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 Blogspots millions of individual sites.
As far as advertisers are concerned, blog readers are a desirable demographicyoung, 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 Aparts 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. Bruners 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 comScores report. But, he said, Theyre not really comparable. Technorati can spider links, but they cant 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.
lol! One day I will! It's just I have a bit of trouble keeping my mouth shut! ;-)
More on why Comscore's sampling is better than most other web tracking services:
http://www.comscore.com/metrix/xpc.asp
Superior Methodology Delivers Unparalleled Insight
Media Metrix 2.0 and Media Metrix XPC combine time-tested and innovative measurement approaches that include:
Foundation of pure Random Digit Dial (RDD) recruitment In keeping with comScore Media Metrix commitment to trusted media research methodologies, RDD a methodology long endorsed by media researchers continues to be at the heart of the Media Metrix 2.0 service.
Largest Work Sample Accounting for nearly half of the U.S. online audience and 60 percent of online dollar sales, at-work Internet users are an increasingly critical population. Media Metrix 2.0 delivers the most accurate and comprehensive reporting of Internet behavior in the workplace using a sample of more than 100,000 panelists, many times larger than the size of any competing service.
University Measurement The 9 million U.S. college and university students online represent an important and impressionable audience for marketers. Only Media Metrix 2.0 features a unique 40,000-member sample to provide exclusive data on this important audience.
Ok, where do we find our stats?
A zot graph would be cool. First to zot stats could be named the minister of information...nah...master at arms.
FR has become the place I (and so many others) go first for news, and I was a network newsie for years.
Thanks, JimRob.
That'll show those DUmmies!!
WOW! All I can say is WOW! Congrats to Jim for having a vision and following through with it!! God Bless FR!!
I have been here since 1998. I used to post more articles, but my local paper (Indianapolis Star) was sold to Gannett, so I don't post from them anymore.
Congrats Jim and team.
FR - THE force to be reckoned with!
Maybe I won't change my name to Nitz, after all.
tired, hang your head in shame...
OK, you can put it up now...we still love you.
There just not so many laundry stories out there! ;-)
Wow, that's quite a complement.
This calls for a party.
I heard Neil Bortz say one day, that FR's Breaking News sidebar was 'THE' place to get breaking news first on the internet. This was several months ago
Funny!
Ping
Disagree. By continuing to be supported by donations we avoid any potential problems of conflict of interests, and any future actions by the FTC to control blog advertising in political campaigns. Its JRobinson's site and he intends to keep it that way; it is his call if he wishes to accept advertisements, but I doubt he ever will.
Yep, if it is not on FR it must not have happened.
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