Last week, Blogcritics' benevolent overlords at Technorati filed their State of the Blogosphere 2008 report.
It's a massive compilation of information, based not just on Technorati's own indexing data but on an extensive survey of bloggers across subjects, geographies, and demographics.
Anyone who blogs, or who enjoys reading blogs, or who just wants to stay on top of the latest trends online should spend a bit of time with the study — it's impressive stuff.
As a longtime blogger myself, I thought I'd give the study a close look and pull out ten takeaways I'll be carrying with me from the report. (Okay, seven takeaways, one of which I repeat a few times. But the one I repeat is, like, TOTALLY IMPORTANT.)
1. Defining "blog"
There's the definition of a blog, "a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video," and it makes me think of all the people I encounter on a daily basis in the marketing world who STILL don't understand what "blogging" really is.
They'll define "blogging" as commenting on the blogs of others, or of just going to a message board and posting. And these aren't low-rent underlings; these are executives and leaders at companies. Scary.
2. Money talks
"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."
So what's interesting here is...hold on.
Hold the crap ON.
$6,000 a YEAR?! For BLOGGING?!
The most I've ever earned is a free copy of an Abba autobiography and some CDs, and only then when I started writing for these fine folks. Before that, I'd never made a DIME off blogging.
(Okay, so I did meet my wife. But I can't use her to pay for comic books and consumer electronics.)
And $75K comes with 100,000 unique visitors per month. So that's basically my target, right there — I just need 100,000 people to become interested in reading my thoughts on One Tree Hill, my iPod, and Dora the Explorer, and I'm all set. The dream is alive.
3. Where're the teens?
The introductory demographic report starts at age 18, and doesn't touch on the percentage of teens with their own blogs. Oddly enough, the Pew Internet & American Life Project put the percentage of teens blogging at 28% in December 2007, up from 2004. That number seems small...could the blog already be going the way of the mimeographed newsletter and the ham radio as a means of communication? Another quote from the Technorati report: "Half of bloggers are on their second blog, and 59% have been blogging for more than two years."
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