Some Interesting Analysis on the Blogosphere

In an interesting summation, Caslon Analytics reports on blog statistics and demographics which may help you get a perspective on what is going on with the Blogosphere. Here are some highlights:

Wired News noted claims that in January 2002 alone some 41,000 people created new blogs using Blogger and that there are now more than 500,000. In August 2002 another source claimed that Blogger had 350,000 users, with converts supposedly “creating a new weblog every 40 seconds, or more than 60,000 a month”…In May 2004 Technorati claimed to track 2.4 million blogs, increasing to 11.7 million blogs in June 2005…Wired exulted that “nine blogs are created every minute and 2.3 content updates are posted every second”…

…Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation and that few are regularly updated. The average blog thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly; one cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly…Perseus claimed that the average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days, with some 132,000 blogs being abandoned after a year or more. The oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days…

…Nanoaudiences are the logical outcome of continued growth in blogs. Assume for a moment that one day 100 million people regularly read blogs and that they each read 50 other peoples’ blogs. That translates into 5 billion subscriptions (50 X 100 million). Now assume on that same day there are 20 million active bloggers. That translates into 250 readers per blog (5 billion / 20 million) – far smaller audiences than any traditional one-to-many communication method. And this is just an average; in practice many blogs have no more than two dozen readers…

…Indeed, a survey of taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers (“often seen as barometers of popular trends” according to Reuters, though God alone knows when hairdressers became barometers of anything), by ad outfit DDB London showed that 90 per cent of barometers have not the foggiest idea what a podcast is, and an impressive 70 per cent live in blissful ignorance of blogging…The UK figure is consistent with independent surveys. The June 2005 Pew Internet & American Life study reported that “the average American Internet user is not sure what podcasting is or what an RSS feed does”. As late as January 2004 Pew found that 68% of online people in the US supposedly did not don’t know what a blog was…

…Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in “unicase”: long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations)…

…Teenagers have created the majority of blogs. Blogs are currently the province of the young, with 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30. Half of bloggers are between the ages of 13 and 19. Following this age group, 39.6% of bloggers are between the ages of 20 and 29…

They also claim that the “blog phenomenon has peaked and – as forecast in an earlier version of this page – most blogs will soon be stored in the part of cyberspace dedicated to hula hoops, pogo sticks and other fashions that reached their use-by date.”

Well, that’s a lot of information, told in an interesting, and often sarcastic way, but what does this information tell you about the state of affairs for bloggers today and in the future? Do you feel that it is reflective of your involvement in blogging? Do you think that blogging has peaked? And what do you think about blogging, podcasting, and such not being common knowledge? Is this just a generational thing? Where do you think blogging will be in another five years? What say you?

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen