Thanks for that post. 3.6 million unique FR visitors is a larger audience, by the way, than subscribes to the NY Times.
Posted on 08/08/2005 4:13:34 PM PDT by kristinn
U.S. blog readership in the first quarter jumped 45 percent to 49.5 million people, or one-sixth of the total U.S. population, a report said Monday, suggesting the blogosphere is becoming increasingly alluring to online advertisers.
The increase means 30 percent of U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the quarter, according to the comScore Media Metrix report.
In the quarter, Google’s Blogspot had 19 million unique visitors, which comScore noted was more than big mainstream media sites NYTimes.com, USAToday.com, and WashingtonPost.com. However, these visitors were spread around Blogspot’s millions of individual sites.
As far as advertisers are concerned, blog readers are a desirable demographic—young, wealthy, likely to shop online, and with high-speed Internet connections. They visit 77 percent more web pages than the average Internet user.
The most popular blogs were Free Republic with 3.6 million visitors, Drudge Report with 2.3 million, Fleshbot (a Gawker Media blog) with 1.2 million, followed by Gawker and Fark, both with 1.1 million. Regularly updated blogs won a huge portion of the overall visits. Drudge Report alone had 44.3 million visits.
Most popular were political blogs followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs, and blogs written by women, comScore noted.
However, blog readership tails off rather quickly, with the majority of blogs having under 100 visitors a day, according to Rick Bruner, director of research for DoubleClick, who co-authored the comScore report.
The comScore data does not address these smaller blogs as many are merged with all the other blogs hosted by the same domain, as in the case of Six Apart’s TypePad. Others simply did not make the cut, as the list was limited to the Top 400 most-trafficked blog domains. All but one of the blog domains used in the report had more than 1,000 unique visitors.
Down the Food Chain
In Mr. Bruner’s opinion, the high price of advertising on top sites will lead companies to “start looking deeper down the food chain for more affordable advertising.” He estimated that about half of total page views on the Internet are to small sites.
Last week, Technorati announced that it had measured 14.2 million blogs, 55 percent of them active, about double the amount in March. The company counted 900,000 new posts per day in July, nearly double the amount in January (see Blogs: 900,000 Posts a Day).
Mr. Bruner said that the Technorati numbers give credence to comScore’s report. But, he said, “They’re not really comparable. Technorati can spider links, but they can’t actually look at traffic.”
An international report that combines blog creation with blog readerships of all sizes has yet to be completed.
The comScore report was sponsored by Six Apart and blog network Gawker Media.
Woo hoo!
Congratulations!
Wow.
Word of mouth, and emailed links, etc...this will only grow from year to year, which is a good thing for the good guys.
Fr is a blog?
Well, look at those numbers!!!
Way to go Jim, Amy & John!!! Way to go Freepers!!!!
I think it's time for another Freepathon! :)
Congrats!
Impressive. FR is changing America.
Thanks for that post. 3.6 million unique FR visitors is a larger audience, by the way, than subscribes to the NY Times.
Congratulations and thank you, sir.
I don't think I want to know what or who 'Fleshbot' is. lol!
Did I miss the numbers on DU? Surely it must be up there. /sarcasm
Everything's a blog these days. It's a handy catchall word.
The left wants to call it a blog so that the FEC can regulate it. It is not a blog, and Freepers should not be so happy about this.
To view the full Behaviors of the Blogosphere analysis, please visit
http://www.comscore.com/blogreport/comScoreBlogReport.pdf
This can't be right. DU and Kos get quoted in the media 10 to 1 over FR. They gotta be in the top 5.
WOW! Fantastic!
HOWEVER, we are all just a bunch of right-wing extremists here, remember?!
LOL...looks the writers of this article don't understand blogs...'cause FR IS NOT A BLOG!!!
Check this out.
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