Don't Measure Blog Readership, Measure Influence

With their usual flair, The Boston Herald declares “Americans aren't all agog for blogs.” They cite new data from Forrester Research, which reports that fewer than two percent of Americans who go online read blogs once a week or more. A mere four percent of technocrats say they read blogs.

To these numbers, I say bah. Now don't get me wrong. I mean no disrespect towards Forrester or their data. I am sure it's spot on. But it's time for someone to devise a new way to measure the impact of blogs - and it aint eyeballs.

Right now everyone's trying to apply old-school mass-media-style metrics to a global medium that really never existed before. That's like trying to eat soup with a fork. You could do it, but your mileage may vary.

The real way to measure the impact of the blogosphere, even as the Herald notes, is with a closer examination of its influence. Someone, for example, should study the number of press articles that every day reference blogs or bloggers. I have a Yahoo News feed that looks for this stuff and I can tell you it's a lot. Just lookie here. Now some of those articles could be the hype bubble we all talk about, but something bigger is going on here. The press are reading blogs and that's all that counts in my book. (Hat tip to Dwight Silverman for the find)

Technorati Tags: Forester, FUD, Statistics

Comments

[Kevin Burton]

I think you're right about influence. Certainly blogs have a lot of influence.

Playing devils advocate though if we're supposed to be seeing a long tail effect we'd see a lot of people reading mainstream blogs but also reading niche blogs which are part of the tail.

I assume you'll still have these super popular blogs but long live the long tail!

[Paul Chaney]

I've been saying that for some time. It's not about how many are reading your blog, but who. Blogs are influencers influencing influencers.

[Critt]

Steve,

Critt here... Tom Barnett's "blog master"... www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog

> and it aint eyeballs.

Spot on post, indeed. Numbers schmumbers I say. As Dave Winer once said at a Thursday Meetings at Berkman bloggers meeting, it doesn't matter if only 2 1/2 people read your blog, as long as it's the right 2 1/2 people.

I agree that media attention is nice, but ... How do I measure influence?

1) email feedback from the blog (e.g., high level business, government, and military decision makers, graduate students and scholars, K-12 educators, citizens in foreign countries, regular folks with everyday jobs.)

2) See #1

And the email feedback often becomes a conversation. And the some of the conversations become relationships. And some of those relationships are now turning into revenue generating business.

I am soon to develop and manage a corporate blog for a startup multi-disciplinary consulting firm. My terms have only one metric: by name, who did you influence this quarter?

Markets are conversations, ergo marketing is relationships. Influence is the ROI.

Thanks for making me think about metrics,

`critt

[yyy444]

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