A recent Pew Report would seem to suggest that.
It seems that both “reading blogs” and “blogging” are on the very low-end of the following chart:
As for us over here at 8BIT, we’ll continue blogging thank you very much.
Might be a good opportunity to capitalize on that niche, right?
Thoughts?
Brian Notess says
Better invest in some 8BIT Facebook community 🙂
Vince Marotte says
yeah, I think it is on the decline.
I wonder how skewed the stat is by people who read blogs but don’t realize that they are in fact reading a blog?
Brian says
This is a useful study, but there are a couple of important factors not addressed in the chart alone (I haven’t read the full report):
1) Do people realize when they’re reading blogs? Many people “get news” from the web; I wonder how many of them are getting news from blogs and don’t realize it. The line between blogs and “regular” web sites has become blurred as blogs’ visual architecture and marketing have become more sophisticated.
2) The purpose of the study was to learn how popular these activities are in each age range, but anybody who decides on marketing/channel choices in an organization needs to always remember the underlying question, “but that’s everybody. What about the influencers?” Pew’s recent study on Twitter indicates that only 2% of Americans use Twitter daily. So why keep that as one of our channels at all? In part because there’s potentially a higher use among those who influence others (I seem remember some study confirming that several months ago, but I don’t remember where it was; sorry). And of course, because Twitter has some unique functionality not replicated by other channels–but that’s a different discussion.
Bottom line: Reports like this, which attempt to distill complex usage patterns into easy-to-understand statistics, need to be read with caution. That said, I do love these reports, and am not intending to belittle their value when used properly.
Brian says
Oops–Vince beat me to the “do they know they’re reading a blog” point. Sorry, Vince; I was composing when you submitted.
Trevor Taylor says
I think it shows us that the fad stage is over and the real world of blogging is here. 20-40% of internet users reading blogs is a pretty good slice.