Gawker sales people tell advertisers that the blog audience is young, rich and influential. It’s a reasonable assumption. Blog readers are early adopters, and one would assume that they would have a profile much like the early internet audience. We hoped that contention was true, because it’s at the core of the pitch: that blogs can help marketers reach people, above all, young guys, who are abandoning network television, and never really got into the newspaper reading habit.
But I have to confess that we only had some data from Burst reader surveys, and anecdotes, to support the case. And one survey, by Blogads, was contradictory, showing high household income, but a surprisingly mature age profile. So, along with Six Apart, we asked one of the leading market research firms to conduct a more rigorous study.
Und die Resultate? Es gibt ein Draft (.pdf, 120 KB) von comScore Networks, aber es ist noch nicht ganz fertig. Zur Erhebungsgröße mehr auf dem Six Apart Typeblog. Gawker und Konsorten wird es aber jetzt schon freuen:
Key Findings
- 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population
- Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million 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
Das wird natürlich die Problogger alle freuen, was die Werbeattraktivität auf dem US Markt angeht:
Unterstützt durch diese Aussage:
The study also found that blog visitors are 30 percent more likely to buy products or services online. While less than 40 percent of the total Internet population made an online purchase in Q1 2005, 51 percent of blog visitors did. The average blog visitor who bought online spent approximately six percent more than the average online buyer.
Was mich etwas erstaunt ist, daß gehostete Blogs (sowas wie Typepad) mehr Visits im Schnitt aufweisen als selbst gehostete Blogs (zB Movable Type).
Spannend ist auch eine Übersicht, was für Themen welchen Traffic generieren:
via ProBlogger
