Who Blogs Now?

Looking at blogger demographics

Blogging has gone mainstream. What was once a quirky hobby based on sharing intimate details with the world has morphed into something used by major corporations and media outlets.

“It seems like every company has a blog section of its own, and is also interested in what the blogosphere is saying about it,” said Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer. “TMZ is considered a blog, but it competes for business with People magazine and other celebrity-focused media.”

As a result, figuring out exactly who blogs has become more difficult. The mainstream adoption of this activity has also brought the attention of spammers, whose spam blogs (splogs) artificially inflate the numbers. In fact, Technorati, which tracks the number of blogs, recently lowered its totals when it started excluding splogs.

However, word-of-mouth is still a powerful marketing tactic, and since influential bloggers are so effective at spreading the word about their likes and dislikes, blogger demographics continue to matter. So, excluding major businesses and splogs, who blogs now?

Although most researchers have noted a young skew to the blog audience, a BIGresearch study found that the average age of adult bloggers is actually 37.6.

A Deloitte & Touche study of blog usage by age found a direct relationship: the younger the user, the more likely he or she was to read or keep a blog on a weekly basis.

For example, 55% of millennials (ages 13 to 24) surveyed read a blog, and the percentages declined for every age cohort in the study until reaching just 16% for matures (ages 61 to 75).

Similarly, 35% of millennials kept a blog, whereas only 1% of matures did. The age groups in between—Generation X (ages 25 to 41) and baby boomers (ages 42 to 60)—fell between those two extremes.

Select Weekly Online Activities* of US Internet Users, by Age, February-March 2007 (% of respondents in each group)

With regard to the ethnicity of US adult bloggers, BIGresearch found that 69.7% were white, 20% were Hispanic, 12.2% were African-American and 3.7% were Asian. These percentages were essentially in line with the US Census Bureau’s most recent estimates of the demographic breakdown of the US population, allowing for differences in methodologies, mixed-race respondents and overlap between Hispanics and individuals of other ethnicities.

Courtesy of http://www.emarketer.com