All week, Technorati is releasing data from its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. On Monday, Technorati told us that bloggers only need 100,000 visitors a month to make $75,000 a year (yeah, right). Today, it offers up something more believable: the more you post, the higher you are likely to rank on Technorati.
Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.
In fact, about a quarter of all bloggers spend more than 10 hours a week posting, and 66 percent spend more than 3 hours a week.
To summarize some of the findings, from the first two days if the State of the Blogosphere report, iCharts, one of our TC50 finalists, put together the following interactive graphs from the data. Mouse over each part of the graph for more information, and use the sliders to limit the data set. Don’t be shy.
This one shows that collectively, blogs a bigger audience than Facebook and as big an audience as MySpace:
Most bloggers aren’t in it for the money (but you knew that already). Three quarters do it for pure personal satisfaction. Bloggers measure success by how many posts or comments they can generate on their blog (58 percent), how many visitors they get (53 percent), how many links they receive from other blogs (46 percent), or how many RSS subscribers they can amass (39 percent). In other words, they measure success by how much much recognition they get. Only 16 percent measure success by how much money they make.
In terms of demographics, Bloggers are predominantly male across America, Asia, And Europe:
And here are some more detailed demographics of bloggers, based on Technorati’s survey:
Update: Here are the first two charts in iChart form for those who want to play around with the numbers.
And this one’s cool, drag the slider at the bottom to collapse the bars together:
It is also important as to what is the content of the blog. Although it is important to keep a consistent flow of articles so people have something to go back to.
I guess this explains why TechCrunch is posting like it has a mad case of diahrea.
The charts aren’t working.
Should be working now. You have to wait for all the charts to load
Hmm. Still not really working for me.
bs
How many of the top blogs are media companies like techcrunch?
I doubt there are many single author blogs in the top 100
Most of them. You can go through the top 100 here: http://www.tech....com/pop/blogs/, or the Techmeme leaderboard: http://www.techmeme.com/lb
You need both frequency and quality, and it is hard for any one individual to keep up with the blogs staffed 24/7. On the other hand, the traditional media companies are looking at the top 100 and are starting to realize they need to get a piece of the action by partnering or launching their own blogs.
The top 100 is really a set of new media startups. We need a better way to track individual voices, which is really what blogging is all about.
“We need a better way to track individual voices, which is really what blogging is all about.”
Absolutely right. nice article
I’m sure revenue is low because most people don’t make much money from their blog. If they did it would be high up there.
It works for me. Good info, thanks for posting it.
Also besides number of posts, it appears that expanding the subjects posted about will drive traffic.
Looking at Huffington’s ‘political’ blog – it is phenominal.
It had been around #10 on Technorati for many months – suddenly when she added celebrity news, it skyrocketed to #1. Of course, this recent controversial election is also helping it.
It appears that Engadget and Gizmodo – also still very popular – is becoming too mundane, so they have declined.
Techcrunch is more popular – despite dividing some tech issues into seperate blogs. One can not help but wonder if it would be at #1if all these issues were in one blog.
But Crunchgear is doing great by itself
Divide and conquer
Yeah I agree that expanding subjects can give your blog a boost. I never write about politics on my blog but finally got fired up enough one night to write some drivel about Sarah Palin and all of a sudden got a lot of traffic. I’m not sure all of my seven subscribers would like it if I kept talking about politics though.
First – I totally agree on the volume game. I know that when I have time to post, I definitely see much higher rankings and much larger traffic numbers. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to post that often lately.
Second, iCharts are fantastic! Going to check that out tonight. Thanks,
Jeff
Erick,
How much time would you say your average post takes for you to compose and publish?
Depends. This one took way too long because I had to fidget with all the embed codes for the charts. It took about an hour, and I didn’t even make the charts themselves.
I put up the Digg post earlier today in about 20 minutes, but that was breaking news. A longer, more thoughtful piece can take 3 or 4 hours.
“blog”… what’s that?
So does that mean if i post like 10 times a day that it’ll help boost my SEO and not go against it? I know how search engines judge you by how frequent you post daily
Hey Eric, I would like to see confirmation but it kind of looks like the $75,000 per year is the average of bloggers getting 100,000 uniques a month.
That means me on the low end making next to squat and then you and Michael on the high end driving up the average.
I agree 75,000 for 100,000 uniques would be really impressive
Next time wear glasses and read slowly and clearly. It said bloggers earn $75,000/year for 100,000 or MORE uniques/month, which can also mean 1,000,000 uniques/month. It clearly says MORE than 100,000/month, it does not mean it is only 100,000.
I hope you understand.
The more you post, the higher you rank?
Sorry, but correlation is not causation.
What I like about this post is the iCharts. Good job iCharts peeps!
icharts is mad slow. more like the craptastic Top50
Correlation does not imply causation. Though it’s possible simply because as you say, the more you post the more likely you are to be linked to. But if I post 10+ posts a day that doesn’t necessarily mean I WILL be more popular.
Technoratti never said 100K Uniques = $75K (implying $63 CPM). On AVERAGE sites getting at LEAST 100K make that. It was corrected in the comments of that post, thought I would correct it again.
100K Uniques probably gets you $200-400 a month. Do it because you’re passionate about the subject of your blog, and money may come as bonus.
This is one of the best posts i’ve seen in last days at TC.
There are too many ways to game the blog ranking system.
* This quantity thing is bogus. Some of the worst bloggers (content wise) have the most postings.
* The incestuous high-fiving between bloggers (which increases blog popularity) is also lame. I’m tired of reading vapid blog postings from “visionaries” that merely cross-reference their buddies for link generation.
* Commenting on others blogs to generate links to one’s own blog is the other practice that is overly-rewarded. The system of rewarding volume of links is highly questionable. A well thought out comment gets the same link that a one-line or one word (”FIRST”) gets.
Technorati sucks at tracking and ranking blogs. Just because it’s one of the only shows in town doesn’t mean it’s worth paying attention to. There are many times where I search on Technorati against a list of information technology bloggers (and new content items) and they don’t show up. They are missing important people, the keyword searches often bring back false positives, there is little “built-in intelligence” (via taxnonomies / ontologies specific to domain knowledge). The service is of marginal value, and yet it has become one of the “de facto” metrics that blogs are compared against. It’s pretty disappointing how little has changed in the last few years in this respect, IMO.
I think technorati is pretty shitty too. Surprised no one has come up and tried to compete against them
yeah, I get about 75K visitors a month on more than one website and neither are even 1/4 to that income level.
Hey Josh, read my above comment, I think you are having a misconception here.
I agree with Alex above: this is just correlation. Quality and relevance are the real indicators of blogging success. Lots of mediocre content will generally get you nowhere — a few mystifying high-profile exceptions to the contrary…
now I understand {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/zk3zRHyP3A_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”now I understand ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/WSqoWiO2Mw”}}}
This data are impressive. but a little frightening: it seems quantity is more important than quality.it could biase in favor of big companies.
bertrand-barthelemy.com
Great article!
Thie more you Post… the more you ‘tend’ to SPAM !! LoL!
I always thought the key to success in blogging was to tell lots of other bloggers how great they were and then sit back and watch the link-love effect in action…lots of mutual back patting/
This is another example of where where Technorati is still highly flawed. It’s lame that quantity over quality is valued in the blogosphere and they should be embarassed by encouraging this behavior as it encourages faceless group blogs over more interesting individual thought leader content.
To be fair to Technorati, Google has this same flaw regarding blogs. If Matt Cutts or Adam Lasnik are listening they should also adjust their algo.
Right now group blogs aren’t normalized when compared to individual blogs. They should be. Let’s say you were having a hot dog eating contest. You wouldn’t compare a team of 10 people to me if I were to compete would you? No, of course not, but that is the flawed comparison that is being made here everyday right now. From Technorati, I expect (and almost cherish) a flaw like this, from Google however, isn’t their whole motto math, statistics and that sort of thing?
It’s OK, one day the economic models for Internet advertising will shift and the financial incentive for quantity content will eventually diminish.
So it will be quality not quantity?
It’s pretty simple how to rank high and I know I will be stating the complete obvious to some of you but it’s all about creating lots of quality content that people are really interested in reading and maybe add even add some value to their daily lives. You can write 50 crappy posts a day on your blog and your not going to get in the top 100. Sorry but I had to state the obvious.
We see different kind blogs; written, video even sms (twitter). But no voice blogs. I wonder why.
That’s called podcast.
I don’t think padcasts are blogs, they are more like internet/download version of broadcast material (i.e. NPR, BBC, Talkshows). You don’t get the individuality of content of blogs from podcast.
In response to the title of this post, I thought everyone knew that. The more you post, the more traffic you would achieve.
Very interesting information. I’d suggest that another way to measure blogs would be to consider how many are part of a single network. For example, how many are part of the Techcrunch network?
I’d also figure that the content niche and audience and advertiser interest in it, is also going to play a key role in this posty-quanity, audience-size, monetization equation.
Fantastic article. I love the stats.
Great info. I love the icharts! Keep it up.
I really like the charts. Good work
I read some of the posts and I think it is a great site. Are you playing with my bright boob Wanna good joke? What did one ocean say to the other ocean? Nothing, they just waved.
These charts takes ages to open..its funny though to see people pepping up icharts so much..