Trumblog

Here is another of my old posts from a now defunct blog, originally posted 5/29/07.

I was in a meeting a few days ago pitching the addition of a blog to a client’s site. I was talking about the blog’s structure, design, features, etc, but the suggestions and questions that I was getting were just a little off. I couldn’t figure out what it was until we started talking about the blogs that we read. Of the eight or so of us in the meeting less than half read blogs on a regular basis. This got me to thinking, is the whole blog thing overblown?

Personally, I love blogs. I love that they have made it so easy for people to have their say online. I love the amount of content this leads to. I especially love how these two factors make available to the rest of us that niche of content that each of us is an expert on; whether that is your own life, brand marketing, bhangra or Battle of the Planets.
So I’m not asking if blogs are good or useful… they are. But according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project of the 147 million Internet users out there, only 57 million read blogs and 12 million write them. That’s a lot of people, but blog readers still only make up 39% of Internet users. Another survey tells us that 3.1% of respondents read blogs once a day, 4% read them several times a week and 4.5% read them about once a week. In their list of top online activities, visiting blogs was number 20 with just 6.7% of respondents, below activities like reading news, watching video, paying bills, and obtaining medical information. To put those numbers in perspective the Newspaper Association of America measured daily newspaper readership at 49.9% of adults in 2006. Most sobering is the fact that 52% of Internet users never read blogs and 16% don’t even know what they are.
So it wasn’t so odd that half of the people in my meeting had very little experience with what I was proposing. My expectations were overblown by the thousands of articles on blogs in Wired and Fast Company, the experience of watching Wolf Blitzer on election night 2006 follow the reactions of a team of 20 bloggers at the Internet café Tryst in Washington DC and of course my personal experience that was just a focus group of one guy from that 3.1% who read blogs daily.
It’s always good to have your assumptions tested and be reminded that they are just assumptions and not the truth. If I want to live in a world with more blogs and more readers then I need evangelize, promote and work for that cause, but always remember who the audience is that I am preaching to. Not that this will be a hard sell though; of the 22 online activities ranked by Mediamark Research, reading blogs had the second largest increase in users from 2005, up 163.9%.
What do you think, are blogs overblown?
Update: Ad Age has a nice overview of who blogs and who reads reads blogs.

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