A few weeks back I posted on whether the term 'blogs' and 'blogging' were past their sell by date. I questioned that when people think 'blogs', whether they still think of guys ranting away online in the small hours. The result is that a lot of people say they don't read blogs, when bearing in mind that most newspapers now maintain one, they almost certainly do.
Svetlana Gladkova has a post up that's made me think of this issue in reverse. Svetlana talks about the Jupiter research that shows that 53% of Internet surfers haven't even read a blog in the past year, and that only 1 in 20 (6%) read one once a week.
Svetlana says, "People expect that blogs are what they are supposed to be - online journals hosted on Wordpress.com or Blogger.com where a friend or a family member you are interested in following shares recent news or photos maybe.
"So when such people arrive to a blog like TechCrunch or Huffington Post from search results on Google or any other search engine, they consume the information available without actually realizing they are actually on a blog."
But the question might be, are they really? Isn't the Huffington Post really an online political magazine? And aren't newspaper blogs like the NY Times Bits the web equivalent of columns that have always appeared in newspapers - after all newspaper blogs aren't somehow separate to the overall operation, they are an intrinsic part of the paper's website.
So the 6% per week figure probably is understated, simply because you are likely to stumble across blogs when doing web searches. But it might not be that far off if you bring 'blogs' back to the original sense of the word, and you do only include amateur or semi-professional efforts hosted on one of the blogging platforms.
Image - Will Lion
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