Blogosphericity

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comScore Networks just released a study that attempts to profile the blog audience in much the same way that Nielsen measures TV viewers. comScore’s approach is different from the ratings offered by Technorati and others who typically count links in that they are observing online behavior directly through panelists.

Based on the habits of 1.5 million US surfers in Q1, comScore extrapolates the total domestic blog audience to be 49.5 million people, which represents about 30% of the total US Internet population. And they conclude that it’s not just any 30% of us, but it tends to be the younger, wealthier, and more connected users who support the blogosphere. Oh, and most importantly, the blog reader is more likely to shop online (51% vs. 39%) and spend more money online ($199 vs. $145) when compared to the average Internet slob.

Fatted calf, thy name is blog reader!

But it’s not all peaches and cream for us blogger ilk. As you might expect, readership is highly concentrated among a few blog sites. Only a few sites, such as the freepers, drudge, and fleshbot, drew over a million unique visitors between January and March. Things quickly tail off from there, meaning Joe Blogspot is relegated to a pretty small and segmented audience.

It’s also an uphill battle for readers if you’re not pitching news commentary or current events. Almost half (43%) of readership flocks to kos, wonkette, and the like, but non-hosted visitation is otherwise highly fragmented among sites that are dedicated to “hipsters” (17% … is that us?), tech (15%), women (8%), media (8%), and so on. Even further down the food chain you have your multitudes of moblogs, fetishes, and esoteric commentary that compose the vast personal miscellany of blogdom. In other words, the blogosphere is still very much a chaotic landscape of opinion, with relatively few properties that have mass on par with established media.

Blogs are clearly growing, but visitation is only one form of impact; it doesn’t address content quality and the subsequent influence on readers or other media. For every big-time scoop that comes from a blog, there are innumerable red herrings or listings that resemble gossip more than news. And then there’s the whole incestuous nature of blogging that tends to use inter-site links as a substitute for investigation and thought. There is value in aggregation, but at some point blogs need to be about more than communal head-nodding if we/they are to gain credibility and retain a meaningful audience.

And finally, it’s important to evaluate the findings of this study (and any others) based on how it was conducted. The research may be based upon the web trails of 1.5 million users, but these are users who agreed to allow a third party to observe their online usage. comScore, like most market research companies, argue that their panelists “look” like the greater web audience demographically, and they go to great pains to include a wide variety of users in their sample. But no matter how many left-handed dentists or albino gamers you recruit, the nature of the recruiting itself attracts certain types of users who will participate and excludes others who will not.

In general, those who participate are more active and more interested in the Internet, but they also do not object to being “watched.” Does this describe you? It certainly doesn’t describe everyone who uses the Internet, and that has implications for the results that comScore is reporting. My guess is that their blog visitation estimates are elevated overall, based on an assumption of hightened awareness and surfing behavior of their sample against the general online population. I’m also willing to bet that most of their conclusions that pertain to relative (as opposed to absolute) usage are correct. Even if the overall sample is biased towards increased usage, the relationships observed across users (i.e. between blog readers and non-readers) are likely to hold true for the population in general.

You can read comScore’s 11 page report here.