Study Puts Blog Readers in Buckets

A new survey of 36,000 blog readers conducted by BlogAds reveals there are different types of blog readers.

* Political types, according the the survey, read five blogs each day, although it's not clear if this is by browsing or RSS. More than two-thirds of these readers are male.

* Meanwhile, the ladies are digging for dirt of a different kind. Seventy-seven percent of gossip blog readers are women, and over 49 percent are ages 22-30.

* Last but not least, there's the mom blog crowd. This group is naturally 90 percent female and they read motherhood and parenting-related blogs.

The problem with surveys like this one is that the blogosphere has a lot of gray areas. There are some blogs that are about cats. There are others that are about world affairs. And there are even more that are about cats and world affairs on the same page. How do you classify which is which?

The same applies to readers. There are moms who are political types. It's all very mushy. There are no hard edges in the blog world like there are in vertical media. A far more useful survey would be about where the lines blur among blog readers and bloggers themselves. For example, do bloggers and readers stick to one topic or many. There's a lot of cross pollination here, making the blog world difficult to analyze the way we do traditional media.

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Comments

[William Stewart]

I agree that it is hard to quantify who is out there participating in blogs. My blog readership is extremely varied, but because it is a political blog, most of my subscribers are male and politically motivated.

I do have an interesting group though that have never faithfully read blogs until they found mine. These people are man-on-the-street types that are so varied in demographics, they don't fall into a specific gender or age group.

[Sean-Paul Kelley]

It very clearly isn't via RSS. There is a question in the survey that asks the respondents if they use RSS feeds. 70% and more say they do not. Clearly room for growth. Go back and look at the survey closely.

[Sean-Paul Kelley]

It's question #24. 70.57% to be exact do not read blogs via RSS. Another 75% never listen to podcasts.

[henry]

Interesting point. You are right that overlap and cross mapping may be frequent as you get into the "mushy" long tail where bloggers aren't narrowly focused.

But I don't think this is the case in the specialist blogs. In the "what other blogs do you read?" section, we see people are very faithful to particular sectors. Yes, someone may read one blog outside their focal point, but three to five are very tightly bunched.

A quick clarification: the total was 56,000 -- 36,000 was just the political blogs.

[David@mokum]

You write:"There are no hard edges in the blog world like there are in vertical media." I'm not so sure that these "hard edges" exist anywhere. They are constructed by marketers to improve our chances of success in communicating, but in reality "Moms" have only limited characteristics in common and many more that differentiate them.

So the blogosphere is probably no different in that sense than the rest of the marketing world.