More power to the blogosphere!
Ayeshea Perera -
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 5:36 PM
Bloggers are not going anywhere. They're getting stronger, more influential, and what's more, earning both recognition and cold hard cash for their efforts. And though this is a phenomenon many of us are aware of, there is now some nice strong statistical data to back it up. Blog aggregator Technorati, which released the first part of its regular report on the state of the blogosphere, has confirmed much of what many of us assumed about the blogosphere, in addition to throwing up some interesting data that I suspect can only surface through the kind of random sampling that Technorati conducted in order to gather data for its report. Like for example that the blogosphere is dominated by men and North Americans as can be seen by the diagrams below:
And apart from other useful pieces of knowledge (if you're into marketing) such as age, profession and income, Technorati has also got a useful nugget of information for anyone wanting to counter the assumption that blogging is primarily a past time and not much else. They're yielding income! According to its report, the majority of bloggers surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. They are also earning CPMs. (So if you're an avid blogger, don't be dissuaded by any put -downers who tell you that you can't make a living out of this) Of course there are some doubts over the figures which you can read here.
Of course Technorati cannot be taken as being reflective of the blogosphere as a whole, but as far as indications of trends go it is pretty much the best picture you're going to get. It has a significant sample data base (read more on its methodology here) and tracks a good portion of the blogosphere. So yes, the signs are good! The incentive is there and the proof has been given.