Bloggers more racially diverse than Internet users in general.
A report issued Wednesday details who is blogging, why they do it and the attention those blogs receive. Some of its findings are unsurprising – the majority of bloggers are young, most blog for creative expression, etc. – but the study also notes that the few moneymaking bloggers tend to be 50 or older and that bloggers are more racially diverse than Internet users in general.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project study, dubbed “Bloggers: a portrait of the Internet’s new storytellers,” also found that of the 147 million American adults who use the Internet, 57 million read blogs, and 12 million write them.
According to the study, about half of the bloggers surveyed were between the ages of 18 and 30, while a quarter of all Internet users fell within this range. Most wrote for a small audience composed largely of other bloggers and family members.
About three-quarters of them listed creative expression as a reason for blogging, and 61% said that they blogged to entertain people. About four in 10 said that their lives were the main topics of their blogs, while 11% discussed politics, 7% wrote about entertainment, 4% covered technology, and 2% blogged about spirituality or faith. Just over half of respondents had never been published before, online or off. The median amount of time spent updating blogs was two hours per week, and 84% described it as just a “hobby” or “not something I spend a lot of time on.”
Bloggers were about equally divided between men and women, and although 60% were white, other racial groups were present in greater portions than in all Internet users, a group in which 74% are white. Half live in the suburbs, compared to 36% in the city and 13% in rural areas. Eight out of 10 bloggers have broadband Internet access, as compared to 62% of all Americans on the Internet. Just under half use their real name when blogging.
Only 8% of respondents said that they have made money from their blogs (often through merchandise sales, affiliate programs, or “tip jars”), and most of these lucky few were 50 or older. Bloggers over 50, who made up 16% of all those surveyed, were also the most likely to cite sharing knowledge or skills as their reason for writing (64% of all those surveyed cited this as a reason to blog). The report did not consider whether there was a strong link between sharing knowledge and making money in blogs.
Only one in three bloggers considered the practice a form of journalism, and although 56% spent extra time trying to verify facts “sometimes” or “often,” only 20% sometimes or often got permission to use copyrighted content, as opposed to 50% who “never” did so.
Although 90% of bloggers read other blogs and 95% got news from the Internet, traditional media is far from dead: 85% read newspapers, about 90% watched television news, and three in four listened to news on the radio. When the study considered all Internet users, it found that they consumed traditional media in about the same percentages as bloggers did.
Livejournal was found to be the most popular blogging site, with 13% of users. Myspace and Blogger followed at 9% and 6%, respectively. Just 2% said that they built their own blogging software, and 5% said that they don’t use any blogging software.
Information about traffic was somewhat spotty: 47% of bloggers did not know how many hits they have received. One in five said they received fewer than 10 hits per day, 17% got 10 to 99, and 13% got more than 100 hits daily. Attention from politicians, political campaigns, and public figures was similarly sparse, with only a tenth of bloggers reporting feedback from those groups. One in 10 said that their blog had been mentioned by traditional news sources.
While the writers of the report believe that randomly calling phone numbers to survey people gave them an accurate representation of all Americans, they do caution that “the low number of respondents is a significant limitation to this study.” While 4,753 general Internet users provided data, only 233 bloggers completed the entire survey, giving the results on blogging a 6.7% margin of error.
This report also does not cover bloggers under the age of 18, likely because these users were analyzed in a separate Pew report titled “Teen Content Creators and Consumers.” According to that report, 57% of teenage Internet users write blogs or post original artwork, stories, or movies. The Pew Internet and American Life project is currently running an online version of the blog survey, which asks open-ended, free-response questions as well as multiple-choice questions.
This study might not provide a perfect cross-section of bloggers; perhaps more avid users would be more likely to come across the study and take it, which would slant the results. Still, it may give additional depth to the information provided in Wednesday’s report. A link to this survey was provided in the Pew Internet project’s “PIP Comments” section, which looks distinctly like… yes, a blog.
