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.
"FR is where you find smart, well educated people who think for themselves."
You obviously haven't been on the threads I've been on.
Na - He's been watching MY posts!! LOL!!!
Wow!
Obviously it's the crevo threads that bring 'em in.
Drudge get's his news from FR
Obviously.
Wow! Congratulations to JimRob and all of the Freepers who have made this possible! We're satisfying the public's thirst for real knowledge and information.
Welcome home, A. ;-)
FreeRepublic is a "blog"?
Thank you so much and a hearty congratulations, Jim and family. I love this place!
Small wonder. A group photo of some of the hard chargers from the FR Texas contingent:
;^)
Thanks for the ping!
**Did you ever notice how often when googling a topic that you find what you were looking for on an FR thread?**
Has happened to me repeatedly. (Although I no longer use google.)
"We are all indebred to you, Jim."
***Is that a concatenation of indebted + inbred? Some of the most interesting words are derived from scarmabled posts.
scarmable
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1318595/posts?q=1&&page=1
made me look these up...should read...
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/416
http://feingold.senate.gov/~feingold/statements/05/03/2005308652.html
Did read!
Those @#$%^^&&*(())_)(*&*&###s!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.