'Net Features : state of the blogosphere

Know the Bloggers: Technorati State of the Blogosphere

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:51:00 GMT

Technorati will be releasing its State of the Blogosphere 2009 report in five consecutive daily segments this year. The first segment, out today, reveals who the bloggers are - the answers hopefully won’t surprise you. Reading through the report, I got the sense that while one could certainly categorize bloggers in the specific way Technorati did, there is a lot of room for variance here – hopefully there will be some more serious discussion as the rest of the report unfolds.

Hobbyists: Representing 72% of the blogosphere, hobbyists say that they blog for fun and don’t make any money from their blogging. Hobbyists say they blog to express their “personal musings” (53%). 71% update at least weekly, while 22% update daily. 76% blog to speak their minds, their main success metric is personal satisfaction (76%).

Part-Timers: The next largest group, part-timers (15%) say they “blog to supplement their income, but don’t consider it a full time job.” 75% of them blog to share their expertise, while 72% blog to attract new clients for their business. 61% say that they measure the success of their blog by the unique pageviews they attract, 60% say they also value personal satisfaction.

Self-Employeds: At 9% of respondents, self-employeds "blog full time for their own company or organization," and 10% do report blogging 40 hours per week or more. 22% say that their blog is their company, while 70% say they own a company and blog about their business. Self-employeds also value page views (63%) over personal satisfaction (53%) as a success metric, and 53% are blogging more than when they started. Finally, in a demographic (bloggers) awash with Twitter users, self-employeds are the Tweetiest of them all — 88% say they use the service.

Pros: Representing just 4% of respondents, pros say they “blog full-time for a company or organization” — though actually very few of them actually report spending a full 40 hours per week blogging. 46% are blogging more than they did when they started. 70% blog to share expertise; 53% blog to attract new clients for the business they work for. Accordingly, pageviews are the most important success metric for pros, valued by 69%, compared to 53% for personal satisfaction.

I’d like to take a second to speak to those that consider themselves pro bloggers – if you’re blogging for personal satisfaction and not pageviews or, pardon my capitalist mindset, revenue – then you’re a hobbyist. Let’s hope the rest of the report is more revealing of the state of the blogosphere.

Technorati Attention Index

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:30:00 GMT

Technorati asked bloggers about the media that influence them (and their content of course) in its recent State of the Blogosphere report, and while the majority (61 percent) put blogs in the lead, it was followed by non-blog web content at 46 percent.

This non-blog content is (this hopefully will come as no surprise) mainstream media content - from the New York Times and CNN.com to USAToday.com and PBS.

Technorati, a media search engine, is set to release The Technorati Attention Index to measure mainstream media websites with the highest number of blogs linking to them in the past 30 days. The data will be updated every month. Here’s the top 10 list from Technorati’s index:

   1. YouTube
   2. New York Times
   3. BBC News
   4. CNN.com
   5. MSN
   6. guardian.co.uk
   7. Washington Post
   8. Yahoo! News
   9. Reuters
10. Los Angeles Times

What content sources inspire your blog content? StumbleUpon? Digg? Comment below to let us know!

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2008 State of the Blogosphere

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:54:00 GMT

Technorati's David Sifry has announced the 2008 State of the Blogosphere. Along with data from the service's massive database of bloggers, Technorati also conducted a survey of some of their registered subscribers, asking questions about how respondents blog and more. Nearly 1300 individuals from 60 countries replied to the survey. Here are some of the most interesting highlights from the report.

- Technorati is currently tracking 133 million blogs
- 7.4 Million blogs have posted in the last 120 days - just 5.5% of all blogs tracked by Technorati.
- 1.5 Million blogs have posted at least once in the last 7 days.
- There are now, on average, 900,000 blog posts tracked every 24 hours. That means that Technorati is tracking 37,500 new blog posts per hour, or 10.4 new blog posts per second!

From the survey of Technorati bloggers:

- The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off.
- The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.