freepers #1? yikes.

August 9, 2005 7:50 PM

Blog readers are young and rich. A study [.pdf] released today concludes that as blogs continue to grow, blog readers are tending to be geekier and more affluent than previously thought. Nick Denton who helped sponsor the study (with SixApart) is delighted with the results.
posted by tsarfan (40 comments total)

My surprising fact: only 32% are between 18 and 34 in age.

Also that the broadband numbers are up to 75% -- although that includes work access so it's kind of worthless.

And that Drudge is still so damn popular!
posted by smackfu at 8:04 PM on August 9, 2005

Why is this a surprise?
posted by Captaintripps at 8:07 PM on August 9, 2005

I was surprised to see mefi was just out of the top ten. I always thought BoingBoing had 5x the traffic of this site.
posted by mathowie at 8:17 PM on August 9, 2005

The Drudge Report is a blog?
posted by aaronetc at 8:19 PM on August 9, 2005

freerepublic is most definitely not a blog.
posted by mathowie at 8:28 PM on August 9, 2005

That's kinda cool the way the survey worked out for the sponsors -- an advertising driven new media company and a maker of blogging tools.

In related news, a Heritage Foundation study reports that Iraqis are happier than ever and housing starts are expected to reach new highs in the next quarter.
posted by cedar at 8:41 PM on August 9, 2005

Did you catch that little footnote about how they didn't include myspace due to technical reasons and that it would've been in the top 10 if they had?
posted by smackfu at 8:41 PM on August 9, 2005

Great. Expect to see more advertising. And even more shilling on BoingBoing.
posted by crunchland at 8:42 PM on August 9, 2005

Sorry if I seem a bit underwhelmed. This "report" looks like nothing more than a notice to advertisers to give bloggers more money. Which is great, I suppose, except that the report fails to give serious mention to the fact that there are millions of blogs; yet probably 100 of them account for 90% of blog traffic (how could you POSSIBLY identify the incomes of the millions of internet users who only goto completely undiscovered blogs (again, millions of them)).

It's no surprise that TypePad sponsored this "finding". The more people out there who think that they can make money off of advertising on their blogs, the more money goes into TypePad's pocket. This is just another tweak against mainstream advertising (which I'm in favor of) to shift ad dollars to more internet-related activities.

I seriously hope that no one takes this information too seriously.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 8:49 PM on August 9, 2005

Sorry, didn't even see cedar's comment. What he said, too.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 8:52 PM on August 9, 2005

I'm suspect that comscore's panel is really representative of the web population as a whole. Certainly it can control for things like demographic and other measures but there is one behavioral attribute the panel members have that does not apply to the population in general: the willingness to have your web activity monitored.

I know I'm not keen on having a company following me around the web and I'm sure many more people are the same way. The panel members self-select themselves. Although the sites visited aren't surprising, grossing the data up to be representative of of all internet users is more than a little bit of a stretch.

I would imagine that sites like Boing Boing and Metafilter are being undercounted and Free Republic and Drudge may be getting overcounted.
posted by birdherder at 9:08 PM on August 9, 2005

"Hipster: Fark, Gawker, BoingBoing, ApartmentTherapy, etc."

Fark is a "hipster" site?
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 10:30 PM on August 9, 2005

I think that the concept has merit.
posted by Hicksu at 10:44 PM on August 9, 2005

Dang, I'm such a party pooper. Not affluent (read rich), not what most would call young and still on dial-up. Yet here I am reading MeFi for lo, these many years now (and girlhacker and slashdot and dooce and kottke and boingboinglite and bifurcated rivets and....).
posted by Lynsey at 11:02 PM on August 9, 2005

heh, I see very few ads, so I'll settle for being young, rich and influential.
posted by Cranberry at 11:02 PM on August 9, 2005

"blog readers are tending to be geekier ... than previously thought"

Considering their image was already fairly well entrenched in geekdom...
posted by mischief at 11:05 PM on August 9, 2005

Is it just me or is the entire blogging concept just another form of "degaussing your own coil"?
posted by caporal at 12:29 AM on August 10, 2005

Jason from Weblogs, Inc. had something to say about his network not being included.
posted by menace303 at 12:38 AM on August 10, 2005

I don't get the geekiness from the blogs that I've read. I didn't think I was a geek...
posted by bully6 at 3:18 AM on August 10, 2005

Blog readers are young and rich

Excuse me, I must be in the wrong room.
posted by nofundy at 5:44 AM on August 10, 2005

I don't get the geekiness from the blogs that I've read. I didn't think I was a geek...

Bully6--the prime characteristic of a geek is that he doesn't think of himself as a geek.

I'm a recovering member of GA (Geeks Anonymous), so if you need a sponsor, let me know.
posted by Kibbutz at 5:53 AM on August 10, 2005

Sounds like public relations bullshit to me.
Show the data and research, please! Failing that, how much did Gawker and SixApart pay for this?
posted by tomcosgrave at 6:20 AM on August 10, 2005

Sounds like public relations bullshit to me.

Nah, from what I've seen the average blog reader is what someone termed an indie-yuppie. Basically, someone with all the overacheiving and narcissism of a yuppie but with the added bonus of cultural pretentious and political self-rigteousness.
posted by jonmc at 6:48 AM on August 10, 2005

Am I the only person who DOESN'T read any of the Nick Denton blogs? Alas, on the internet I am also terminally uncool.
posted by Emperor Yamamoto's Eggs at 6:51 AM on August 10, 2005

I can probably go along with that
posted by hotfun at 7:04 AM on August 10, 2005

And then there's Tim Berners-Lee:

When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium

Bringing in the eyeballs for adverts is a creative and demanding task.
posted by gsb at 7:28 AM on August 10, 2005

Apparantly, they are rich, young, and... right wing.

Isn't MediaMetrix the company that basically made up all those traffic numbers during the internet bubble, in order to boost IPOs and let companies feel good about themselves?

I am skeptical of this survey when it comes to specific sites. A survey not paid for by the companies which stand to benefit from it would be more accurate.
posted by cell divide at 7:30 AM on August 10, 2005

Should I be sad that I don't keep up with who Nick Denton, Jason Calcanis, or any of the other "new age super highway entrepreneur hucksters" are? I mean, it's slowly becoming a viable medium, but alot of this "Wonk wonk we're great wonk wonk" self hype just makes my eyes bleed.

matt, I think BB readership probably dropped when they killed comments. Or maybe it was before that, when the self promotional hyperbole exceeded the "cool interesting links" ratio enough that all the comments became flamefests against the posters.

I think interaction is a very important component of this interweb and it's what makes people come back. Everyone has something to say and "web sites" are where people can feel they can do this. I know I reload MeFi several times a day specifically because it's not a one way megaphone. I thought that was why all these "young intellectuals" *gak* were flocking to the interweb, because we could talk, too, and not just be talked to.

And about studies, they almost always seem to reflect the interests of whoever bought them. Which is why I am very hesitant to accept a study till it's been, well, studied to death by three or four "independent" groups -- and by independent I mean independent of an agenda, say, of what the study was commissioned for.

Having said all this apparently a loosely associated friend of mine actually pulls in $1500 US from CPM banner ads on his "blog" which is mainly just titty and re-links from other sites (yes, without the 'via'). So, you know, maybe I'm in the wrong biz..

And please note that if I said this in person I would speak slightly exaggerated to every " " and I would not draw quote signs in the air for thelistener, in fear of severe physical trauma.
posted by cavalier at 7:50 AM on August 10, 2005

i heard amazon.com is a blog. confirm/deny?
posted by keswick at 7:58 AM on August 10, 2005

Thank you, jonmc, for pulling out that asinine Stereogum meme.
posted by gramschmidt at 8:09 AM on August 10, 2005

I dunno, gramschmidt. I thought it was an accurate description of certain people. YMMV.
posted by jonmc at 8:25 AM on August 10, 2005

"Wonk wonk we're great wonk wonk" self hype just makes my eyes bleed.

cavalier - I'm with you.

Check out the "wonk, wonk" of a recent Calcanis blurb on his web journal:

"[Our] outward facing business model—the one the public experiences—is as a long tail publisher. We’ve got a bunch [sic] blogs, a bunch of bloggers, and a bunch of advertisers. We surf Chris’ long tail to profitability. Case closed, you can file us away in your dotcom history books as the latest evolution of the AOL Greenhouse, GeoCities, and About.com breed.

However, the truth is that what we are creating has nothing to do with publishing. What we’re creating is a lifestyle for passionate people that *results* in our outward facing business model."

Uh, right, buddy.
posted by ericb at 8:34 AM on August 10, 2005

They forget to check and see if bloggers were pretty too. Because I feel pretty, oh so pretty and witty and gay (well, not in the sense that I need re-education but I'm generally in a pretty good mood).

I like that people are calling it PR bullshit. Reporting a study's findings isn't bullshit unless the study is bullshit or the PR monkey is drawing unreasonable and unsupportable conclusions from the data. I work in market research and the conclusions drawn from research studies is only as valid as the survey they come from.

That said, its pretty depressing that an asshat site like Free Republic is the #1 ranking "blog". I feel sad about the world now.
posted by fenriq at 9:42 AM on August 10, 2005

What we’re creating is a lifestyle for passionate people that *results* in our outward facing business model."

When you gaze at your navel the thing that is outward facing is your butt. Oh my and such a demographically attractive butt it is. Go ahead. Try and look away.
posted by hal9k at 9:49 AM on August 10, 2005

Blog readers are young and rich.

And apparently they lie a lot on surverys too.
posted by keptwench at 10:53 AM on August 10, 2005

Blog readers are young and rich.

And apparently they lie a lot on surverys too.

Or they still live in their parents' house and count household income as everyone's income in a house they don't own. Silly, either way though.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 11:36 AM on August 10, 2005

This survey is bullshit.

1. As cedar pointed out, why did this survey have to be sponsored by people who served something to gain in the process (i.e, Denton and Six Apart)? That's as questionable as the Bush Administration rewriting environmental reports.

2. There is absolutely no information here about how the consumer behavior was collected, save "Source: comScore." This is again damn fishy, because a bona-fide survey relies upon multiple sources of data to ensure an independent result. Here, we have data that is produced in-house with very nebulous information as to how it was arrived at.

3. "The visitors and visit counts in the report are projected estimates for the U.S. Internet population based on the panel samples." What was wrong with using present samples? And how exactly were these estimates arrived at? Was there pressure from Denton and Dash to play up Gawker and Typepad?

4. I can't trust any survey that isn't footnoted that offers explicit reference to other studies.

5. Why are there no names attached to this? You may as well have had this report authored by Frosty the Snowman. This is worthless, because we can't track credentials.

6. Given that comScore has a shaky spyware-related history with how it collects some of its data, how we can trust it to be completely straight with its results? And what of proxies?
posted by ed at 12:20 PM on August 10, 2005

Here's a link to comscore's methodology and the survey's methodology is on page 3 of the PDF. Wow, they use RDD, random digit dialing. Dang, that's labor intensive and expensive. The survey was authored by comScore's Graham Mudd and DoubleClick's Rick Bruner, again on page 3.

ed, you would have a hard time believing the market research my company publishes then because we don't cite other studies in our surveys. But we're also a primary research company that controls the data from collection to publication and our methodology is posted on our site. As well as the populations that our data is drawn from.

#1 Just because the survey's results are inline with the sponsors wishes doesn't automatically invalidate them, it makes them suspect but does not disqualify the survey.

In response to #2, sorry, you're wrong here. Valid surveys do not have to rely on multiple sources of respondents as long as the population being drawn from is not drawn from biased sources. Granted, they don't discuss their methods openly and that's an issue but not drawing from multiple sources is not an issue. And also, check page 3 for the survey methodology.

To #5, I noted the authors above, did you skim the PDF or not read it at all?
posted by fenriq at 1:19 PM on August 10, 2005

fenriq: You're right about the authorship. I missed that last sentence. But it still doesn't mention who specifically at "comScore" "working with Rick Bruner" was involved with this. That was what I objected to. It could have been the gofer, for all I know. Further, without specifics as to how the research was conducted or the data obtained, I must again conclude that this survey is useless.

I think we have a fundamental difference here about what constitutes a survey proper. Check out, for example, any of the surveys over at Pew, which not only cite other sources, but when using in-house data, apply a margin of error and provide raw data for others to confirm figures and follow the conclusions formed.

That the comScore study is secretive and absolutely convinced of its correctness is highly suspect. You still haven't addressed my point about the "present samples." Perhaps working at a market research company has dulled your bullshit detector. Might I offer you some spare batteries in bonhomie?
posted by ed at 2:13 PM on August 10, 2005

The money brings the bullshit, which helps to grow more money. So it goes.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:06 PM on August 10, 2005