Tipsheet

Blog Studying

Mary Katharine Ham
Mary Katharine Ham  |  July 14, 2006 11:29 AM
iMedia Connection reports on the popularity of blogs, which, in good news for me, is growing:

  • Visitation to blogs continues to grow rapidly, showing a 56-percent
    increase during the past year to 58.7 million visitors. This figure
    represents 34 percent of the total internet audience.

  • The top blog network is Google-owned Blogger.com, garnering 20.8
    million visitors in May 2006. MySpace Blogs ranked second with 14.4
    million visitors (up 115 percent), while MSN Spaces ranked third with
    9.6 million visitors (up 205 percent).

  • The top special interest blog in May was TVSquad.com with more than
    two million visitors, followed by FreeRepublic.com (up seven percent to
    1.6 million visitors) and Breitbart.com (1.6 million visitors).
Now, all of this stuff is notoriously hard to measure, so who knows what it actually means. And, I wonder about several things. I don't really consider Free Republic or Breitbart blogs, but news sites in the model of Lucianne. They're blogg-ish, I reckon, but not blogs.

I also wonder if the study counted all visits to MySpace pages as blog visits, which would greatly inflate the number of visits. MySpace blogs are part of MySpace pages, but I imagine they're much less-trafficked and used than MySpace homepages.

On the other hand, I'm glad to see Free Republic ranked so high. A conservative political site coming in ahead of the pop culture blogs is pretty impressive, as the pool of people interested in Nick Lachey and wardrobe malfunction imagery is naturally larger than the pool that gets pumped about RNC ads.

These are the guys who did the measuring in this study.

Anyway, I like to keep my eye on these kinds of things just to figure out if I'm gonna have a job in a couple years. Y'all help me keep my ear to the ground will ya? Hee.