Tag Archives: State of the Blogosphere

State of the blogsphere report

I haven’t written about this before, but Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report is now so mainstream, it was included in one of my daily journalism news digests. Has the future arrived? I think so.

TechCrunch, via WaPo, gives a snapshot of day 1 of the report:

And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:

Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it?s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.

Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. The vast majority of all bloggers (79 percent) write about their personal interests. No surprise there.

But more than half of all bloggers also write about business. While only 12 percent identify themselves as official “corporate bloggers,” a full 46 percent consider themselves “professional bloggers” (meaning that they write about their industries, but not in an official capacity).

Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men, 42 percent went to graduate school, and 50 percent earn more than $75,000 a year, and 58 percent are over 35 years old. (Someone call the diversity police).

More than half have a separate full time job. More than half of survey respondents have been blogging for more than two years.Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. San Francisco and the Bay Area has the most bloggers in the U.S., with New York City, Chicago, and LA also having a strong showing. Although, as the map below shows, the geographic distribution is actually pretty wide.

There were also a few good quotes in the report, more than one that should make old-school newspaper curmudgeons nervous.

“Until recently, ‘the Blogosphere’ referred to a small cluster of geeks circled around a single tool. Now it refers to hundreds of millions of people using a vast warehouse of tools that allow people to behave increasingly online like they do in real life. We have entered the Age of Normalization in the Blogosphere.”

Shel Israel
Social Media writer & speaker
co-author, Naked Conversations
globalneighbourhoods.net

“The future of blogs will have arrived when you check your favorite blog for sports news in the morning, instead of your local paper.”

Richard MacManus
Founder / Editor
ReadWriteWeb
www.readwriteweb.com

If this is a subject that interests you (and I have an unhealthy interest in demographics, so bear with me), you should totally read the first day report on the who of the blogosphere.

In related blogosphere news, the Media Bloggers Association has gone 2.0 and now requires new members (which should be everyone, since it seems all current members got dropped so they would all become 2.0 members) to take an online media law quiz, before paying annual dues of $25. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea or a bad investment, especially if you haven’t taken a media law course before (which I was forced to as part of my journalism curriculum in college. But all that is possibly obselete now).

BTW, I really kind of wish I could’ve gone to the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. Not only would they be talking a whole lot about one of my favorite subjects — blogs — Mike Shinoda is a keynote speaker. Hee.