March 14th, 2005

Filed under:
Blogosphere
5 Comments »

Blogads Reader Survey

I’m a bit late on this, but I wanted to mention the recent Blogads reader survey. It’s interesting data, but I wonder a bit about Blogads’ data collection practices.

The survey suggests that the average blog reader is about 35. That’s just silly–I imagine the actual age, across the entirety of the blogosphere, is closer to 22. What about the vast ‘dark web’ of personal blogs, each with 10 or 20 readers a day? When you get millions of them, they add up–don’t forget the Long Tail. And how can the average blog reader be 35 when the survey also states that the largest category of readers is students? To pick on another dubious data point, why do the survey results skew significantly to the Democratic Party when the country skews the other way?

I was interested to read that 72.4% of respondents don’t use RSS. I suspect that’s a bit low, but it reflects the lack of mainstream adoption. Regardless of the inconsistencies I mentioned, good for Blogads for running this project.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

donna
March 14th, 2005
2:06 pm

I suppose what you can get out of that is that the average age of a blog survey respondant is 35.

Livejournal posted stats about the average age of their users, I believe it was … 19 or 20. Of course, livejournal tends to attract a younger crowd. Do they count as blogs? Hmm.

[Reply]

oncee
March 14th, 2005
6:59 pm

David Sifry’s State of The Blogosphere has much better data. I find it hard to believe that bloggers are middle-aged men who are democrats and make more than $90,0000 a year.

The BlogAds data on rss and podcast usage also seems more than a little skewed.

[Reply]

Mark
March 14th, 2005
9:27 pm

“And how can the average blog reader be 35 when the survey also states that the largest category of readers is students”.

Easy: despite being the largest category, students only make up 10% of the total.

I suspect the biggest problem with this survey is how the sample was chosen - it’s not a random sample of all bloggers, but “some of the biggest bloggers, many of whom focus on politics and/or sell blogads”. So the long tail is not taken into account in the way it would be if a random sampling of all bloggers was taken.

[Reply]

Maggie
March 15th, 2005
10:30 am

I may have skewed the results! I am 35 and currently back in school for my Masters…:>)

[Reply]

GeritolKing
March 15th, 2005
3:09 pm

I’m 53 and I read blogs. So do many people my age and a lot who are older. Don’t underestimate the number of retired people on the internet. If I read a blog and an 18-year-old reads a blog, then our average age is 35.

OTOH, you probably do have point about the skew to Democrats when most Americans (and especially most of the technically savvy) are Republicans. That one does make you wonder.

[Reply]

Add a comment