Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, fresh off a new funding and site relaunch, is showing some of the highlights from their annual State of the Blogosphere report today at BlogWorld in Las Vegas.
We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below.
Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland.
72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don’t make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.
2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.
Lots more detail in the full presentation, below. You can see the audience reaction on Twitter here.
The twitter number doesn’t surprise me. It’s so simple to do why wouldn’t any blogger add it?? It’s easier to add and keep up with compared to a facebook or youtube page which require a lot more work.
Yup those stats were expected. Twitter is the favorite tool for bloggers. Reliable stats for its the biggest blog directory’s report.
I am more of a hobbyist now.
We’re seeing Twitter and bloggers as highly symbiotic, with Twitter enabling a way to create dynamic relationships with their audience. We can measure this using http://www.tweetiator.com (which lets people see who is tweeting links to their content).
I’m a blogger and this is pretty spot on. Where is the video Michael?
Of course they leave out the total # of active blogs, # of new posts per day, etc. (which they included in their 2007 report). Why? Because there are far, far fewer. Blogging is dying and Technorati is fast approaching irrelevancy.
I’m amazed at how much blogging has evolved. Check out this snoozer from my blog 10 years ago (we called it a Daily Journal) http://web.arch...Date=2000-01-31
Hats off to TechCrunch and other blogs that have really elevated the medium.
Professional blogging has appeal.
It will be interesting to see how these stats change over time. If blogs evolve the way most of us think than I think we will see a higher percentage in the corporate and self employed categories. I’m guessing that hobbyists for the most part means people with a blogger or MySpace account who hardly ever blog but have an account on file.
Thanks for the information Michael, and congrats on being a heavy hitter throughout the blogosphere. I assume that position will only get stronger as we move forward.
Interesting that the last slide claims that Technorati is the number 1 Blog Search Engine in the world.
Alexa says that Blogcatalog.com passed them by in early 2009, and is twice as popular now.
Marketing Fluff (i.e. lies) are BAD P.R. !!
Very informative presentation!
Blogging becomes more and more popular, which make me very happy. More news from blogs, less from tv.
It’s a shame that self-employed bloggers are reportedly using ad-networks. I guess some of them are high quality networks, but I can’t imagine that it could be more profitable than going after direct ad sales yourself.
@ Mark Fulton, consider that it may not be more profitable, but ad networks are definitely more scalable, easier to vet better quality advertisers and on a marginal basis, easier to do a greater quantity of business without having to decrease the quality of content just to manage ad negotiations, collections, etc.
Lots of room for improvement regardless, but the future is in networks not one off person-to-person sales and negotiations absent some revolution in technology that doesn’t currently exist.
Great information on the current state of the blogesphere! Had a great time at BlogWorld Expo and learnt much about this exciting industry.