Posted on 10/25/2005 5:20:28 AM PDT by paltz
What Blogs Cost American Business
In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Work Years Reading Them
By Bradley Johnson
LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.
About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age's analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- bloggers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.
Bogged down in blogs
While blogs are becoming an accepted part of the media sphere, and are increasingly being harnessed by marketers -- American Express last week paid a handful of bloggers to discuss small business, following other marketers like General Motors Corp. and Microsoft Corp. into the blogosphere -- they are proving to be competition for traditional media messages and are sapping employees' time.
Bosses accept some screwing off as a cost of doing business; it keeps employees happy and promotes camaraderie. Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, said blogs have become the favored diversion for "office goof-off time," though he notes it's hard to segregate blog time since blogs often bounce readers to professional media sites.
But at the end of the day, more blogging means less working. Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, said at-work blog time probably comes in addition to regular surfing -- meaning more time on the Web but less time on the job.
Expansion of online behavior
"Since for the most part blog readers tend to be the most engaged readers of online content," he said, "they do not appear, at least for now, to be sacrificing time from their favorite news sites. Instead, it looks like blog usage is in addition to existing online behavior."
Some blogs do relate to work, but deciding just how relevant they are to the employer is open to debate. For this analysis, Ad Age chose a simple score: Count all business blog traffic, half of tech and media blogs and one-fourth of political/news blogs as directly related to work.
Based on ComScore's tally of blog categories, this suggests just 25% of blog visits directly connect to the job. Employees this year will spend 4.8 billion work hours absorbing wisdom from other blogs that may enlighten visitors but not amuse the boss.
Wasted time
Hard and detailed data on blogging time is limited, so Ad Age's analysis is a best-guess extrapolation done by reviewing blog-related surveys and data. By Ad Age estimates:
There is strong evidence of workday blogging. Server traffic for Blogads, a network of sites that take ads, spikes during business hours, reflecting page views on about 900 blogs. FeedBurner, a blog technology company, also sees a jump in work-time hits.
Workday traffic patterns
"Traffic rockets at 8 a.m. EST, peaks at 5 p.m. EST and then slides downward until L.A. leaves the office," said Blogads founder Henry Copeland. "You see the same thing in the collapse of traffic on weekends. & Bottom line: At work, people can't watch TV or prop up their feet and read a newspaper, but they sure do read blogs."
And they create and post to them. Technorati, a blog search engine, now tracks 19.6 million blogs, a number that has doubled about every five months for the past three years. If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009. Imagine the work that won't get done then.
Well, I admit I spend way to much time on this site during working hours.
But since I am self employed I consider this as break time.
Better then going out for a smoke.
I think editors in search of easy fillers update the cost-to-business goofing off to reflect whatever happens to be the latest and greatest interest. Before the internet, the big waste in employee time was playing computer games. Then with the internet came sending and reading personal email, then surfing forbidden web sites, then . . .
My wife said it was shopping on line that was the problem her coworkers have. In what I do there are no computers but the homeowners tell me porn is a big problem in corporate jobs, not blogs. There was a story I heard the other day where this guy was fired even after being repeatably warned by the computer guy for the company.
It's from Ad Age....maybe I am too suspicious, but ad revenues are down for all print media. Bet they would not do such a study if workers were reading Time or the NYT.
JMO
FR is not a blog, so I'm okay.
So, let's see. No problem for reading traditional outlets on the web, like the fake but accurate news agency. But when there's an interest in getting another perspective, it's a waste of time in the author's view.
How about blog reading as being proactive rather than passibe about gathering information?
How about blog reading as an expression of not taking no for an answer?
I dunno. These traits sound like someone who is going to be an asset to a company.
PS Where is mr author on the topic of MSM wasting the viewers/readers' time for the useless drivel that they try to feed us?
It sounds as though the writer has a grudge against blogs.
Small sacrifice for a happy employee. Personally, I simply cannot be "on" all day. I need downtime.
Work expands to fill the time you have to complete it. Sp I doubt that 3.5 hours of blogging per week will even be felt.
Translate?
Yeah...if an employee is spending 3 hours on the internet there's a problem...But if you produce a crappy product or people ain't buying it because thay have to spend that cash on energy...don't blame the employee.
"Workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They must win the world. Workers of all lands, join together!"
Oh yeah, we Americans need to work longer and harder.
What are my kids' names again?
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.