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Behaviors of the Blogosphere

Yesterday comScore Networks with co-sponsors Six Apart and Gawker Media released the "first of its kind" research on blogger behavior.   Along with Rick Bruner, director of research for DoubleClick, comScore developed a list of the top 400 blog domains, based on lists maintained by services including Daypop, Blogdex, Technorati, and more than 14,000 sites listed on TruthLaidBear.  Futher analysis of the traffic of thousands of blogs identified 350 top blog sites and blog networks.  The analysis also included large weblog hosting services, including Blogspot, Xanga, TypePad and others, which represent millions of blog sites.  The methodology outlined in the report explained that the visitors and visit counts are projected estimates for the entire U.S. Internet population based on the panel samples. (Bruner clarifies some of the finer points of the methodology here.) This 11 page report (PDF) is well worth the time to check out.

Key findings include:

  • 50 million US Internet users visited blog sites in Q1 2005.  That is roughly 30% of all US Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total US pop.
  • Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1M visitors each.
  • Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women.
  • Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections.
  • Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online.

The study incidentally is called Behaviors of the Blogosphere: Understanding the Scale, Composition and Activities of Weblog Audiences.  Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media shares his views of the research here.

Posted by Cymfony on August 9, 2005 at 09:43 AM | Email this post Permalink

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