62 percent of Internet Users Are Blog Clueless
By the end of 2004, 32 million Americans were blog readers, 58 percent more than the year before, according to a just released Pew Internet and American Life Project memo, which adds, “By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture.”
However, it reports, 62 percent of online Americans do not know what a blog is, but 7 percent of Internet users, or about 8 million people, have created blogs.
The memo says:
Blog creators are more likely to be:
Men: 57% are male
Young: 48% are under age 30
Broadband users: 70% have broadband at home
Internet veterans: 82% have been online for six years or more
Relatively well off financially: 42% live in households earning over $50,000
Well educated: 39% have college or graduate degrees
January 3rd, 2005 at 11:59 am
This survey has been getting a lot of attention, and it is great to see a lot of new blogs on the net. However, the Perseus Blog Survey reminds us that many of these blogs will soon be abandoned. While we celebrate the creation of new blogs, we should also be looking for ways to make blogs sustainable. As anyone who has kept a blog knows, blogging takes a lot of hard work and discipline, and especially starting out with very few readers, it takes a lot of will to continue your blog. A great way to reduce some of the work it takes to maintain a blog and also grow readership would be to encourage more cooperative blogging. See DotSquiggle’s entry on this subject (http://www.dotsquiggle.com/weblog.php?eid=89). This would also make blogs more about the discussions that occur on these blogs and less about the personalities behind the blogs, which might be intereseting but will not sustain long-term interest on their own.