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.
Yup, you're ready.
AND DARN PROUD OF IT !!!
Thank You Jim Robinson
Woo hoo!! Free Republic is rated number one in the blogosphere!! LOL
Way to go FReepers!!
Memo to lurking DUmmies: You ain't seen nothing yet. Read my tagline losers....
From the ComScore report:
Unique Visitors in January:
FR 3,633,000
Drudge 2,266,000
Total # of Visits in January:
Drudge 44,279,000
FR 5,848,000
Duh 1,306,000
http://www.comscore.com/blogreport/comScoreBlogReport.pdf
I'm listening to Callahan's Con, by Spider Robinson (science fiction). I'm certain he meant FR when, speaking of his protagonist's friends as a "commune that doesn't live together," he said that one internet "commune" has over 60,000 members.
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.
Now I know what double click does when I remove it with ad aware
We are not a blog.
Insistance is futile.
You've posted a total of 160 threads and 10,319 replies.
Is Red Herring an internet newspaper about technology?
The writer knows that blog is short for "web log" so why doesn't he (or she) know there is a difference between news forums and blogs? The Drudge Report is not a blog, neither is Free Republic.
(Don't click that.)
Now, if each of these visitors donated only a single buck a quarter...
But of those, 2.1 million were trolls!
Thank you for such a wonderful site. Congratulations!!!
Polly
WE'RE #1! WE'RE #1! YAY!
And well deserved, FR is so much more than just politics. I don't think a lot of people realize that.
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.