110 million people read weblogs? Blog recognition rises: Blogs beat Britney Spears by 23%

NEW YORK: Steve Rubel writes:

According to Google News, since July 2 [2004] there have been more than 3,470 online news articles that have mentioned either blogs, weblogs, blog or weblog! This by far eclipses the number of articles that have mentioned Britney Spears in the same period (2,820).

So the ability to recognize a weblog has been rising, perhaps catching up to actual readership of weblogs.

How big is that readership?

The February 29, 2004 Pew Internet and American Life Project report (web summary or full report in pdf) of by Amanda Lenhart, Deborah Fallows, John Horrigan says:

• A mere 2% of Adult Internet users maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey.
• Between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs, per other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004
• In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users.
• About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog. Most of those who do contribute material are not constantly updating or freshening content. Rather, they occasionally add to the material they have posted, created, or shared.

Rubel again:

Despite the huge buzz, however, the vast majority of Americans still probably do not know what blogs are. ... My theory is that this number is actually far higher because many news consumers can’t differentiate blogs from professional sites because of their high-quality design and content.

Compare and contrast the following sites, for example … Gawker vs. New York Magazine PaidContent.org vs. MediaWeek Not much difference right?

Rubel argues for improved labeling that "I am a weblog". On the other hand, the blogging form may simply be absorbed into other media as a best practice for some types of communication, collaboration, and community.

Let's examine the numbers further. In past studies, the number of people reading was twice the number writing. Presumably, 50% of the reading were community were bloggers reading other bloggers. This observation may be supported by power law statistics from Technorati that show most blogs (in the tail of the curve) are read by a handful of people. However, if readership is being directed from outside the blogosphere, perhaps from Google and other search engines, this ratio may no longer apply.

We may also be noticing a drift in the definition of "blogging " by the Internet at large. This first came to my attention on the Howard Dean 2004 presidential campaign weblog, where people who posted comments to a weblog post started to call those comments "blogs". Per David Weinberger, this blurring of blogging and commenting is useful in community building. Among other things, it lowers barriers to participation (it is easier/simpler to comment than post) and creates context for conversation (blog fodder) . It also affects our ability to measure readership.

With an Internet population of about 1 billion users worldwide and 186 million in the US (ClickZ Stats) then:

• Blog Authoring: 2% - 7% (Is this a huge spread?) =
• 3.7 - 13.0 bloggers in the US
• 20 - 70 million bloggers worldwide
• Blog Reading: 11% =
• 20.4 million blog readers in the US
• 110 million readers worldwide

I'd want to question whether the Pew results can be extended worldwide, given their methodology, but it seems likely.