Technorati

Blogs Not Going Away: State of the Blogosphere 2010

November 9, 2010 By Des Walsh

Back in September this year, in a two part series of posts on Technorati’s latest State of the Blogosphere survey – see here and here – I encouraged readers to join me in participating in the survey. I also shared what I had been able to glean about these surveys, going back to the first one in 2004.

The report of the 2010 survey is now available.

Some key findings (see summary for more details)

blogs are in transition, “no longer an upstart community,now with influence on mainstream narratives firmly entrenched”
sharing of blog posts is increasingly done through social networks
the blogs of others remain the primary influence on bloggers, far more than social networks or other media
significant growth of mobile blogging
influence of women and mom bloggers on the blogosphere, mainstream media, and brands
bloggers and consumers optimistic about blogging’s future

The publishing format continues the practice begun in 2009 (for the 2008 report) of setting out the report findings over several “days”, notionally, in that in 2009 although the Introduction appeared on August 21, all the “Day” sections, from Day 1 to Day 5, appeared actually on the one day, October 13. The dates make more sense this year, with the Introduction and Day 1 published on Nov 3, then Days 2 and 3 on Nov 4 and 5 respectively.

The various topics covered are listed under the several days:

Day 1 — WHO: Bloggers, Brands and Consumers
Day 2 — WHAT: Topics and Trends
Day 3 — HOW: Technology, Traffic and Revenue

For anyone who likes graphs, this survey report should be a particularly enjoyable read, as there is a plethora of graphs.

The graphs do a particularly good job of breaking out the findings across the four categories of bloggers nominated for the study: Hobbyist, Part Timer, Corporate, Self Employed. An example is in the image below, illustrating findings on the question of whether Twitter is seen as having been a more or less effective driver of traffic to a site than a year previously: I thought it quite instructive that the perceptions were pretty consistent across the different categories of bloggers.

State of the Blogosphere 2010: Twitter effect graphic

I was particularly interested to read the findings on the question of how blogs are perceived to have helped the businesses of part timers and self employed. In rising order of importance, the most value is perceived as being:

asked to speak at industry conferences as a result of blog
helped company be seen as a thought leader within its industry
prospective customers have read blog and purchased products or services
blogger has much greater visibility in their industry because of blog

I can’t see why corporate bloggers were left out of that segment. I would find it very interesting to know how the corporate bloggers perceived their blogging in terms of helping their business. Perhaps part of the challenge in gleaning that information would be in finding a framework to distinguish all the different types of “corporate” blogging roles, from the CEO blogger to the blogger or bloggers in marketing or customer service. If anyone knows of another study that provides some of that data I would love to know about it.

All in all, this is a very interesting report and for my part I expect it to repay further and closer study. My personal plea to Technorati (yeah, I know they are listening to me, LOL) is that for next year’s report they produce a downloadable, single PDF version: this business of clicking through pages may have some purpose, but it is a pain.

Image credits: screenshot images – see Technorati Creative Commons license.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging, state of the blogosphere 2010, Technorati

Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey Continued

September 28, 2010 By Des Walsh

This is the second of two posts prompted by Technorati’s invitation to bloggers to participate in the State of the Blogosphere Survey 2010.

In my previous post on the subject, published yesterday, I wrote about the surveys from 2004 to 2007, produced by the then CEO of Technorati, Dave Sifry.

Today I focus on the surveys from 2008 to the present.

The Post Sifry Phase: Back to “State of the Blogosphere” – 2008-2010 – including asking the Bloggers

For 2008, the title of the report was back to “State of the Blogosphere”. The report was produced in August 2009 and appeared on the Technorati site, unlike the previous reports which had been on Dave Sifry’s site. (Sifry had stepped down as CEO and left Technorati in August of the previous year). The Introduction referred somewhat confusingly to previous “annual” Technorati reports on the subject (Sifry referred in his April 2007 report to Technorati being “known widely for its quarterly State of the Blogosphere reports”).

The report declared that for 2008 a decision had been made to “go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind”. The report had drawn, evidently for the first time, on a direct survey of bloggers, “about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially”.

As to the numbers, the report includes a graphic which shows 133 million “blog records indexed by Technorati since 2002″. The survey of bloggers is reported as having drawn responses from 66 countries across 6 continents.

Following the posting of the Introduction to the 2008 report on Aug 21, 2009, the more detailed report appeared as five segments, which were to be released in “five separate daily segments” and which all appear to have been published on the one day, October 13, 2009 (with headings, Day 1 to Day 5). (I include these publication date details not to be nitpicking, but to save anyone else researching these reports some of the head-scratching I’ve been doing today).

The State of the Blogosphere 2009 report was published on the Technorati site, in sections over several days, in October of that year, i.e. only two months after the publication of the 2008 report. The focus was explicitly on “professional bloggers” and attention was given specifically to:

professional blogging activities
brands in the blogosphere
monetization
twitter & micro-blogging and
bloggers’ impact on US and world events

As with all the previous reports, there is valuable information in the report, especially for anyone in business or government. Take for example this summary of some socio-economic data from the “Who Are the Bloggers?” section of the report:

Overall, bloggers are a highly educated and affluent group. Nearly half of all bloggers we surveyed have earned a graduate degree, and the majority have a household income of $75,000 per year or higher. As blogging is now firmly a part of the mainstream, we see that the average blogger has three or more blogs and has been blogging for two or more years. We are also noticing an ever-increasing overlap between blogging and mainstream media.

The report saw professional bloggers growing “more prolific, and influential, every year”, with Twitter and other social media representing one of the most important trends.

A note on use of content in the reports

As mentioned above I have in past years used material at times from State of the Blogosphere reports, including graphs as well as data.

For what it’s worth – and I am no expert on copyright, let alone Creative Commons, I note that, as the 2008 and 2009 reports are on Technorati’s site, they appear to come under the Creative Commons licence (Attribution, NonCommercial 3.0) there, which is more restrictive than the simple, generic Attribution 1.0 Generic licence on Sifry’s site: it should be noted however that Sifry asked also that anyone using the charts or data “please keep the Technorati logo and links to the original reports in any use of the charts or data”. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on these issues could shed some light on any implications that might have, say for those of us who might like to use for instance, a graph from one of the more recent reports in a presentation. Anyone?

Completing the 2010 survey

I found completing the latest survey an interesting exercise. In what I guess is a not uncommon reaction with surveys, I found there were questions where I thought there was room for at least one more option, others where I thought the choices too constrained, but with less obvious scope than I could see to add in clarifying notes (I know they are a nuisance for the “quant” folks, but I always think it’s useful to have such spaces, for the benefit of the responder and potentially also for the benefit of researchers).

I was also uncomfortable with having to answer some questions in terms of one blog, even though in an earlier question I had indicated I had more than one. To illustrate how that became problematic, there was a series of questions about revenue-generation from one’s blog, with specific reference to advertising. Up till then I had been answering pretty much with this Des Walsh dot Com blog in mind and with hindsight I think some of my answers were more about another blog. I’m not sure how that problem could be overcome, but no doubt it is not beyond the collective wits of the research company to solve it.

All that being said, I did very much appreciate the opportunity to participate and I believe other bloggers would find it at least interesting to do so. I also think it’s important that the researchers get a mix of responders, from “pro” bloggers through niche bloggers (e.g. travel, health, celeb-watching) to people keeping a blog more as a personal journal.

In that vein, and unlike the previous year’s report with its focus on professional bloggers, the 2010 survey seems to be casting a wider net, going for instance by the email inviting me and others to participate:

The survey includes questions like how, when and why you blog. Is this a side business, full time job or something you do for fun?

And now, in accordance with the emailed encouragement to me to share the link to the survey, here is where you can participate.

I’d be interested of course to hear about others’ experience with the survey.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging, State of the Blogopshere, survey, Technorati

Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey

September 27, 2010 By Des Walsh

Bloggers, whether full time or part time, experienced or starters, are being invited to participate in Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Survey 2010.

Surveying bloggers directly for the Technorati surveys was first done for the State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Although I was invited to participate in the 2009 survey, I am pretty sure this year is the first time I have responded. The survey intro suggests a commitment of 15-20 minutes, which could be right on average, although I thought it took me a tad longer.

Here is the link for the survey.

In various presentations over the years I have found these State of the Blogosphere reports valuable in preparing presentations and workshops, so I’m personally pleased to know that Technorati is continuing to arrange the surveys.

They also form a valuable historical record of the evolution and world-wide growth of blogging.

For the sake of anyone wanting to go back over previous reports, it is worth noting that there are two distinct phases in the production of the reports from 2004 till now, with the dividing point being about mid 2007.

This post runs through the first stage up to mid 2007: tomorrow we’ll look at the second stage.

Technorati Surveys: the Era of Dave Sifry’s Authorship of the Reports

The first of the State of the Blogosphere studies was provided just under six years ago, on October 10, 2004 by Technorati Founder and first CEO Dave Sifry and appeared on his Sifry’s Alerts blog. Technorati was by that time tracking some 4 million blogs and the blogosphere had been doubling in size at least every 5 months.

By the time of Sifry’s next report, in March 2005, the blogosphere had doubled again and from 12,000 new blogs being created per day at the time of the previous report, there were now 30,000-40,000 per day, with no sign of the pace of growth letting up.

There was a further report in August 2005.

In the October 2005 report, a year after the first report, the size of the blogosphere was still doubling around every 5 months and Technorati was tracking 19.6 million blogs.

Further reports from Sifry followed in Feb 2006, Apr 2006 and Aug 2006.

By August 2006 he reported that the blogosphere, with over 50 million blogs, had grown by 100 times in 3 years, still doubling every 5-7 months.

Then in his October 2006 report (actually published on Nov 6, but headed October 2006) Sifry reported a total count of 57 million blogs tracked by Technorati, with 100,000 blogs being created every day.

Interestingly for people who may, like me, be interested in the role blogging can play politically worldwide, and with the benefit of hindsight about the unfolding of events in Iran over the following few years, Farsi had become a notable blogging language.

As we reported last quarter, English and Japanese remain the two most popular languages in the blogosphere. There were, however, some interesting shifts among those languages less well represented in the blogosphere. Holding steady in the number three spot is Chinese, although it has dipped slightly to 10% of the total posting volume. A notable change, however, is that Farsi has pushed its way into the top 10 languages in use in the blogosphere, bumping Dutch, which had held the number 10 spot over the last couple of quarters, into the number 11 spot.

(By July 2007, all Iranian bloggers would be required to register their blogs with a virtual government office.)

Sifry’s October 2006 report touched also on data about blogger behavior and identified some correlations between the age of blogs, frequency of posting and their relative status in terms of the Technorati authority ranking. Unless I’m missing something, the results were as you might guess: in my paraphrase, the longer you had been around and the more frequently you had posted the higher your ranking was likely to be.

The 2007 State of the Live Web Report

In April 2007, Sifry produced a somewhat different report, titled “State of the Live Web”, looking at a broader range of social media, now with over 70 million blogs and 120,000 new blogs a day (100 times the number from that first report back in 2004).

What made it possible to take a broader, social media scanning, look was “the rise in the use of tags across all forms of social media and the increasing implementation of tags by the publishing platforms supporting each form of media”.

As well as the State of the Blogosphere, data and interpretation would now be provided on the “State of Tags”.

And the bottom line was “explosive growth in the tags index”.

People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages. Tags adoption has become a phenomenon across the Live Web, and we are seeing a correlative explosive growth at Technorati.

That 2007 report was to be the last report in the series to be produced by Dave Sifry. He has helpfully supplied a complete, linked list of his reports from 2004 to 2007.

In my post on this topic tomorrow we will look at the surveys from 2008 to now (Update: for the second post in this two part series, see Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey Continued .)

In the meantime, here is that link again to participate in the 2010 survey.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging reports, Dave Sifry, State of the Blogosphere, survey, Technorati

Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 Farewells Big Numbers Game

September 27, 2008 By Des Walsh

BlogWorld Expo Keynote by Richard Jalichandra

Like some others, over the past year or two I’ve been less than impressed by Technorati’s performance. So I was frankly not overwhelmed with anticipation of the keynote address by Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, at last weekend’s BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas.

In the event, I was pleasantly surprised. A big factor in that was when Jalichandra announced that he was to be giving us a preview of Technorati’s latest State of the Blogosphere report, which was to be released in stages over several days, starting with the Monday immediately following the conference, September 22.

But I listened and watched in vain for something I had come to expect from these reports. How many blogs are there now and how fast is the blogosphere growing?

Thinking that I might have had a lapse of attention (there had been a party the night before, although I had not stayed very late) I looked forward to reading the report online.

But when I finally got around today to reading the serialized sections of the report, I found myself looking in vain again for the latest aggregate number of blogs, worldwide.

They were not to be found.

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Alerts 2004-07

Aggregate numbers of blogs, with accompanying graphs, a staple of the Technorati alerts for several years now, have demonstrated the cumulative dramatic growth of the blogosphere. As these graphs have been made available by Technorati under a Creative Commons license, I and others have been able to make ready use of them in blog posts and slide presentations, without having to seek special permission from Technorati.

Apart from my general interest in the statistics, I liked having these graphs available to help explain what was happening with the blogosphere – and then being able to segue into what that might mean for business.

A quick recap.

Technorati stats Sept 2004 Exactly four years ago, in September 2004, Technorati was tracking just under 4 million blogs and reporting on various statistical findings about those blogs.

At the end of July 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs and it was noted that the blogosphere was doubling every 5.5 months.

By April 2006, the number of blogs being tracked was 35.3 million, with a mild slowing of the doubling factor to every 6 months.

A year later, April 2007, Technorati was tracking 70 million blogs, so the doubling factor was now around 12 months.

As then CEO of Technorati, Dave Sifry, commented at the time, the “slowing” of the doubling factor should not have caused surprise:

… we’re dealing with the law of large numbers – it takes a lot more growth to double from 35 million blogs to 70 million (which took about 320 days) than when it doubled from 5 million to 10 million blogs (which took about 180 days).

A Worm of Doubt Crept In: Just How Good Were the Aggregate Numbers?

As I recounted in a blog post here at the beginning of this year, New Year’s Day in fact, my confidence in the comprehensiveness of the Technorati statistics had been shaken a couple of months previously when visiting China for the first time. The figures being supplied to me there indicated that in 2007 there could well have been over 70 million blogs in China alone, about when Technorati was saying that blogs in China made up for only 8% of its total 70 million.

And even if the figures from China were a tad self-serving, a tad rubbery, were we now to understand Technorati’s recurring phrase that its figures were for blogs which Technorati was “tracking” to mean that they were implicitly acknowledging (and perhaps explicitly somewhere) that there were a lot of blogs they weren’t tracking? In other words, were there a lot more blogs than Technorati was counting?

My assumption is that the answer is yes. But whether or not there is a simpler explanation, it seems Technorati, “under new management”, has moved on.

Game Over: With One Leap, Our Fearless Tracker is Free!

From reading the latest report, it looks like from here on the discussion about aggregate numbers will from now on be, at least as far as Technorati is concerned, academic.

And the question of how many blogs there are outside the USA – and, by implication, in English – will be academic too, as far as Technorati is concerned.

Why?

Because the latest report declines to make a declarative statement or estimate on the total number of blogs and simply quotes some statistics, mostly from the USA, indicating that there are A LOT (although note that a worldwide figure from Universal McCann is tucked in, showing 184 million blogs worldwide):

There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

Having thus absolved itself of any responsibility to provide or adjudicate on total numbers – and wisely in my not totally humble opinion – the Technorati report focuses on providing some analysis of what all the blogging activity means:

For the 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report, we wanted to go beyond the numbers to deliver insights into bloggers and the state of blogging today. Who are the bloggers, why and how do they do what they do, and what is the impact on their lives and work?

To achieve this, Technorati has surveyed a random sample of Technorati users and supplemented the data and analysis with its “traditional analysis” of Technorati’s data. Those surveyed provided 1,290 responses from 66 countries. There is a brief explanation of the survey and analysis methodology on the Technorati site.

There are six sections to the report, including the Introduction:

The short story?

First, the story is now about the Active Blogosphere, defined as “the ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation”.

Other conclusions:

Blogging is a global phenomenon

Blogs are here to stay

Blogs are profitable

Brands permeate the blogosphere

All good.

But I’ll miss those climbing graphs of aggregate growth.

Filed Under: Blogging, China, Events Tagged With: blog numbers, blogworld08, China, Richard Jalichandra, State of the Blogosphere 2008, Technorati, USA

New Report Says There Are Now 47 Million China Bloggers

January 1, 2008 By Des Walsh

One of the most profound experiences for me in the year past was visiting China. Or, more specifically, visiting Beijing and then Shanghai. And one element of the experience was that I began to learn how pervasive blogging is in China.

My colleague Debbie Weil, who was in China at the same time and on a panel I moderated at ad:tech Beijing, was also amazed at the numbers quoted to us, both of Internet usage overall and of the number of blogs. In an interview in December, Debbie links to the Pew Internet report of July 2007 for a figure of somewhere between 165 and 210 million Internet users. At the time we were in Beijing, Debbie was also given to understand there were some 30 million bloggers.

Up till then I had been relying on Technorati’s regular surveys, the latest of which, in April 2007, indicated a total 70 million blogs worldwide, being tracked by Technorati, of which only 8% were indicated as being in Chinese. Even allowing for the possibility or even likelihood that the China figures Debbie and I were being given were rubbery, there is still a big discrepancy. I can only assume that the systems of measurement are different.

And just last week, on Dec 26, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released its Survey Report on Blogs in China 2007. According to the report summary, by the end of Nov 2007 the number of “blog spaces” (which I assume to mean what we in the West call simply “blogs” or “weblogs”) was 78.82 million, with 47 million bloggers (“blog writers”): the report summary helpfully adds that this means that one out of every thirty Chinese or one in every four Internet users (“netizens”) is a blogger. (Thanks to Allesio Jacona for the link to the CNNIC report summary.)

For me, what was more interesting than the aggregate numbers was the growth story. According to the CCNIC report, at the end of 2006 there were 17.5 million bloggers, with 30 million more in the past year to reach the current figure of 47 million (give or take half a million). Incidentally, it’s interesting that there are more women (57%) bloggers than men (43%) – converse of the pattern in the West.

The report indicates that the bloggers cover “almost all of the areas of people’s daily life” but there is not much in the summary of the report to indicate whether, or how much, blog production is related to business.

One of my goals for the New Year is to garner information and case studies on the takeup and practice of business blogging and other business usage of social media in China. I have a number of links already to China blogs with a business focus and once I have them in some semblance of order I will begin to share them on this site, together with other links that come to light.