There has been a great deal of discussion in recent months about utilizing blogs for advertising. Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a very interesting article on the growth and popularity of blog ads: “Blogs Grow Up: Ads on the Sites are Taking Off.” (Subscription required.) The article notes how one political blog has started taking ads and brings in more than $5,000 a month, enough for the head blogger to be able to hire a part-time assistant to help him do research. The article also cites some interesting statistics:
As with many things about the Internet, precise details about the “blogosphere,” as some bloggers call their world, are hard to come by. There are many thousands of blogs, though most of them are read by only a few people. A popular blog, though, can attract more than a million readers a month. One study said that roughly 4% of the 126 million American adults with Internet access report going to blogs for information.
Another article on blogs from Tech Central Station–“Is The Blogosphere Half-Empty, or Half-Full?“–provides some hard-to-believe statistics:
The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between two percent and seven percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs. . . According to one study, there are 146 million adult Internet users in the US alone. The article claims that between two and seven percent of those Internet users keep blogs. If we round that number to five percent, it means that there are 7,300,000 Weblogs in the US alone. And that’s a lot of Weblogs!
The article goes on to say that this means there are more bloggers writing than there are “people reading USA Today (whose circulation is 2.6 million), The New York Times (1.6 million) or The New York Daily News (805,000).”