Do Regular People Really Read Blogs?
Andrew Romano over at Newsweek wrote earlier this week that US presidential hopeful John McCain's new blog, written by former Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb, is an entertaining read compared to Barack Obama's corporate-like campaign blog. To Romano, this indicates that McCain is stuck in "insurgent mode." "Team McCain has concluded that the only way to stay competitive is to stay lean and 'human' and hope that the candidate's accessibility and charm earns him free coverage," said Romano.
Nancy Scola over at TechPresident, on the other hand, disagrees. Scola thinks that the Obama campaign simply decided that a fun-to-read campaign blog isn't a great use of resources. And she might be right -- how many people really read blogs, anyway?
While it would be easy to look at McCain's blog as a runaway success because the posts routinely have thousands of comments (Obama's posts get hundreds of comments each, but the blog has a higher post volume), there is likely more to it than meets the eye.
A Harris Poll from earlier this year found that 56% of Americans never read political blogs, and just 22% read them several times per month or more. Interestingly, those over the age of 63 were the most likely to be readers of political blogs -- just 17-19% of Gen X and Gen Y (called "echo boomers" in the Harris Poll report) read political blogs.
That certainly explains why Obama has eschewed building a conversational blog while McCain has hired a well-known and experienced blogger -- Obama appeals to the specific demographic that doesn't read political blogs, while McCain appeals to the demographic more likely to subscribe to them. But could that speak to a larger trend in the blogosphere as a whole?
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any recent polling data on how many people are reading blogs. In 2005, comScore found that about 30% of American Internet users read blogs (PDF), though their study didn't really delve into how often people were reading blogs. Is that 30% who read them every day? Or 30% who have visited a blog in the past year? The study doesn't make that clear. Very likely, things have changed since 2005 -- when the comScore report was published, for example, TechCrunch -- now one of the world's largest blogs -- was only 2 months old.
However, if the Harris Poll data is at all representative of the mainstream public's reading habits toward blogs in general, things don't look particularly rosy. The Harris Poll found that of those who visit at least one political blog at least one time each week, 76% read under four of them -- a third read just one. So even though blog readership may be up, people are reading only a small number of blogs on a regular basis.
Further, 69% of political blog readers don't comment on blogs. That indicates that those thousands of comments on McCain's blog are coming from a small subset of political junkies who closely track the political blogosphere. And that makes sense anecdotally. I have a number of friends who are political and tech junkies and consume tens or hundreds of blogs daily and comment on them regularly. But I have an even greater number of friends who are average, mainstream web users. They may read blogs once in awhile -- but generally only in topics they are very interested in (i.e., even though they might be casually interested in politics, and read political news that pops up on their MyYahoo! page, or watch it on TV, they'd never think to read DailyKos or Little Green Footballs unless specifically pointed there).
Fellow ReadWriteWeb blogger Sarah Perez has observed the same thing with her friends, who might occasionally read an industry blog or visit ICanHasCheezBurger, but generally don't regularly consume blogs every day. So really, just how mainstream are blogs? If avid blog readers tend to be those who are deeply passionate about a subject, and if most of the mainstream's interactions with blogs are on a limited basis, it could be that blog reading is still a very niche activity. What do you see anecdotally from your non-geek friends? Do you know of any recent studies into blog readership that we've overlooked? Let us know in the comments.
Image via factoryjoe.
ShareRelated Entries
2 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4191
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
The easiest way to look at my friends (I'm 22 and most of my friends are/were college students) is to divide them into two groups: those who use a RSS reader and those who don't. I would say it's about 95% in the no reader category. Once someone starts subscribing to feeds, their behavior completely changes and they start commenting.
I'm sure those numbers will start to change as people become interested in more and more blogs. Browsing to multiple pages doesn't scale very well.
I routinely poll at the supermarket, and am right at approx 7k people polled. 90% do not read blogs, do not have a blog, never heard of Facebook, never click on text ads, and have no idea what an RSS feed reader is.
Outside of us industry types, there is very little true uptake in these technologies, which does not bode well for CPC ads.
There may be plenty of ad money, but eventually, the bottom has to drop out, for the average Joe and Josephine are just not Twittering.
I only read two kind of blogs -
1. Tech blogs (mainly web development)
2. Baseball blogs
That's it.
Great question -- I've posted it on LinkedIn with a link back here. If you'd like to monitor the results, check it out here! http://tinyurl.com/58wauv
Personally, I monitor and try to read a couple dozen blogs of various types.
Political communication is not one size fits all. The ardent partisans want to be in on the know. A blog that fits their taste is a boon to their enthusiasm. Since politics runs on enthusiasm as well as money generating the enthusiasm is an important part of campaigning. It is hard to miss this point with Obama enthusiasts and Ron Paul enthusiasts as active as they have been in this election.
Most people are not interested in politics. They do not read political blogs. They do not read political news. They watch political commercials because they cannot get away from them. A blog aimed at them is a waste of time -- they would not be interested if they found out about it.
There are lots of gradations in and around these two poles. But candidates need to reach all of those gradations to be successful.
So the relevant question is not how many people read blogs? It is how do people find their way to candidates before the election. Some with blogs. Some with TV ads. Most with neighbors. But none of those ways is unimportant.
I'd say about 90% of my real-world customers have no idea what a blog is until I show them one. Then they seem to think it's either a 1.News Site or 2.Somebody's online journal. Since I always setup Firefox if they don't have it, I introduce them to RSS via the Live Bookmarks addon, and give them a few feeds like AP, Reuters, ESPN and of course Wordout. If they seem to be interested in tech I'll add RWW and a couple of others. I'm guessing only about half these customers actually use their RSS feeds, and they probably remain fairly uninformed about blogs.
We're the guys who really read them, I think. And for now, I'm satisfied with that. I don't place much weight on my subscriber count mainly because I think that only reflects a minority of the web readership. I try instead to utilize the value of search, and publish what I think people will be looking for. So far about 57% of my visits are from search, and the numbers are all rising.
This isn't to say I don't care about my subscribers. Some of them are quite vocal about it when they don't get what they want, and I always respond to threats.
How about RWW? I see your RSS numbers are really high, but how does your visits_search/visits_direct stack up? I'm betting you still get a substantial amount of search visits?
Josh, good post, but Im really surprised that you havent been able to digg out the numbers from the PEW Internet studies, that regularly post reports on the online activities of Americans.
Their latest reports on blogging and blogreaders is from July 2006: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/130/press_release.asp
(linked in the release), here they actually found that 39% of online Americans read blogs...
See also another PEW project on which sources young Americans use to get news of the current presidential campaign:
http://people-press.org/report/384/internets-broader-role-in-campaign-2008"
"Fully 42% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly learn about the campaign from the internet"
greets, Liz K, Danish blog-researcher
The majority of people I know say they don't have time to read blogs. I keep trying to get them into it but I'm not having much luck.
Of course regular people read blogs.
Bloggers are people with attitude. I read the blogs headlines daily and pickup the most interesting ones & ignore which I am not interested. I see most of them have got addicted to it. Regular people read blogs, but it should have a valuable info.
-Deepa (dooyt.com)
Josh
We've some stats here, use this profile tool (free) and see all 'spectators'. Those are those that consume social media
http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html
@Lisbeth: Thanks for the comment! I did see the Pew studies, but 2 years in Internet time is an eternity, so to me it didn't count as "recent" enough (the Harris Poll is only a few months old). I think their latest survey of blog readership was actually January 2006.
@Jeremiah: Very cool tool -- I hadn't seen it. Thanks for the link. I wonder: what do you define as social media?
(Then again, for the matter, how do we define a blog...? If the only type of blogs you read are notes on Facebook and diaries on MySpace ... is that the same type of blog reading I was referring to? I'm not really sure... ;))
Initial (within 24 hours) responses from my LI query (http://tinyurl.com/58wauv) include:
eMarketer did a major research project on this, this past May. They determined 50% of US Internet users (94,100,000) have read at least 1 blog in the past month. This is expected to increase to 67% (145,300,000) in 2012.
(It appears the reference was to http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006327 which has some interesting stuff -- I won't be paying $695 for the bonus plan)
There are some interesting (and helpful comments, including everything from "I read them all" to "I'll read a blog the day after hell freezes over" (I'm paraphrasing).
PS -- I vote that anything above 140 characters can be considered a blog :-)
Did you know that more people read a political blog every day now, than read a daily newspaper?
*****
Many bloggers are providing valuable news service to readers that newspapers and news channels do not provide.
Many people who read blogs are opinion-shapers.
An analysis like this is not complete without looking at the content that blogs provide, and the opinions that are shaped by that content. Blogs obviously have had an impact on our politics since about 2002 or 2003, and they are getting stronger all the time. If Obama has made a decision to not appeal to bloggers; then he is MAKING A BIG MISTAKE.
mb
I have heard recently that DailyKos has one and a half million unique visitors each month.
I am sure there is data available at the larger blogs as to the number of unique visitors.
I am a member at DailyKos. I am retired. I believe you are correct that there are a few people who leave a lot of comments at McCain's blog.
There are about 20,000 active users at Daily Kos each week. Active means that they read, write comments, give recommendations on comments and diaries, or write diaries. I am sure if you ask Markos, he will share his data.
http://www.dailykos.com
Are we regular people? I like to think I am. Are we movers and shakers and activists? Definitely. People I visit with get out the vote, give money, write to Congress persons and write letters to newspapers.
At DailyKos and TalkingPointsMemo, people access
up-to- date news instantly. We are often weeks ahead on some stories and with in-depth analysis. Josh, at TPM, investigated and broke the story about the abuse of Attorney Generals.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com
Jay Rosen is another person to contact who has studied blogs.
http://www.journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/
"39% of online Americans read blogs"
and I presume about 1% of those realize they are reading a blog and not a news site or other "official" source?
In some studies that we've performed with a large mailing list we've found that most of our customers prefer information that is delivered through static documents than through blogs:
Customers Pick Static Documents over Blog Entries 8 to 1 on Average
I only know about blogging because my big brother started this one and every now and again I have a look at it to see if I understand anything.....unfortunately I'm more "techno-eek!" than "techno-geek"...Well, Richard may have this cool website but at least I got the looks in the family!
And I wonder the difference between the number of people who read' blogs compared to those who subscribe to RSS feeds. I feel like there's an important distinction in there somewhere, and it has to do with information consumption habits and comfort with technology. Going to someone's blog and reading it is easy - just like going any other website, but subscribing to that blog's RSS feed and accessing it in a feed reader is a completely different activity.
I'll speak to political blogs.
I think few people read blogs, and most of those who regularly read them already have one of their own, whether they regularly add new material or not.
Michelle Malkin had an interesting piece about three years ago on the subject.
I'd say multiply her figures by five to ten to get today's numbers. Most people have no idea what a blog is, and I'd pick one percent of the population as a good ballpark figure if you want my guess...but those people tend to be the activists, bloggers, and the movers and shakers.
I have multiple tracking systems, and they never agree on how many visitors I have on my websites. About half my visits are from search engines, and ironically...it is how I found this blog.
Blogs are over-hyped as to their readership, and as long as money can be made from it (think "advertising revenue") we'll never really find out how many people really read blogs. The money I make from ads and consulting is beyond my influence, and I'm riding this train to the bitter end.
I think blogs are great because after reading many, many of them one can obtain a wealth of knowledge and gain a lot of interesting insight.
Thanks so much!