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.
WE'RE #1! WE'RE #1! WE'RE #1!
Perfect heading in light of MSM reporting everything except what happens.
Genius.
I wonder what they're doing over at the DUmmies place?
Good news bump.
fyi
I think in honor of our #1 standing in Unique Vistors of 3,633, we should have a donation campaign asking for $36.33 from every Freeper. Ps. we are #3 behind Drudge & Fark in rankings by Visits. Charles Johnson's, littlegreenfootballs ranks # 18.
The mouse has roared. Since it's been some time since FR statistics were in the public domain, I'd hope you'd agree this would be a good time to post a seperate thread with John's new and highly secret web traffic statistics.
You have built a network with greater influence than that of the Och/Sulzberger empire, surpassing their cloat, and destroying their business model, all within a 9 year period.
History books shall bear your names, jaded marxist journalism professors will begrudgingly recall your rise to dominance, and the corrupt will curse your name.
High praise indeed.
Seems like they would have a special term for a group effort.
Stats are available here
http://www.freerepublic.com/usage/awstats/
Bump for later reading. Congratulations, freepers. Keep up the good work.
Sorry, didn't even look at the dates on that page. Guess they're a bit old after all
See what you did.
Ping a ling...
CONGRATULATIONS INDEED.
AND TONS AND TONS OF THANKS.
Congratulations are in order!!
This is the place to be for fast breaking news!
I've noticed more and more that I'm seeing things on my local TV news station that I've already read here two, three, four days earlier.
Again, Congratulations!!!!
Wow that's fabulous. Thank you for the ping, I might have missed this otherwise.
And yes this fits me to a T......oops(well 3 out of 4 ain't bad)
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.
LOL----When I saw that you were posting to ME, and MurryMom together, I wondered what in heck WE had is common, to be posted to simultaneously...
I would like to think I am unique, but in a "nice" way, thank you! lol
My mother will call on the phone to talk politics on some breaking issue she saw on TV and I'll tell her I already knew about that subject.
It is scary, lol
And good!
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