I originally reported the following data on the growth of the blogosphere as part of a post I was writing about a year and 1/2 ago. As sometimes happens, it got stuck in draft world and I never completed it. A couple of items recently came to my attention that motivated me to revisit this…
The first was the report I cited yesterday from businessandblogging.com that spoke of the million small business blogs out there and the tremendous, cost effective, marketing opportunities blogs provided for small business (referencing a New York Times article on the topic.
The second was my curiosity about how big the blogosphere has become. I zipped over to Technorati to take a peek at the number of blogs they’re tracking:
Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.
…
The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.
Compare this to the data below from April 2006 when Technorati reported tracking over 35 million blogs with 75,000 new blogs created each day. So just in the last 20 months we’ve seen an 321% in the number of blogs tracked and 233% in daily postings.
(They say baseball is awash in steroids. I think that the blogosphere is juicing big time! How soon before Congress calls hearings to investigate the real story? 
The blogosphere, social media, podcasting, vidcasting,/YouTube … all interconnected channels for business of all size to get the message out. In this wired and wireless, information-flying-all-over-the-place, low cost and no cost of production world it’s inexcusable not to be using any or all of the above to promote your message!
My Original Post
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
Blogging continues to move into the mainstream as a.) more folks blog and b.) more folks read blogs. According to a phone survey of over 7,000 people conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project…
- About 57 million Americans are reading blogs, up from around 39 million in 2004.
- 12 million Americans write blogs up from 8 million in 2004. As an aside, Technorati reports that they are tracking over 35 million blogs and that over 19 million blogs continue to be posted to 3 months after creation. Further they state that 75,000 new blogs are created every day and the blogosphere continues to double every 6 months (from State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth)
- 84% of bloggers are under 49 and 54% are under 30. They tend to be avid consumers and heavy internet users.
- Bloggers are passionate about what they write. Only 7% state that their principal goal is to make money from their blogs. Most blog to document & share their personal experiences while a substantial percentage use their blogs as a teaching tool…
Access Pew’s Reports on Blogging…
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