Another Blog Study

31 October, 2003 8:45 AM

Another blog study. It samples only 400 English written blogs, interesting results.

The starting point was a this hypothesis based on the media and observing A-list blogs:

1. Blog content tends to be external to the author ie not personal.
2. Blog authors are typically well-educated adult males
3. Blogs are interactive, attracting multiple comments
4. Blogs are heavily interlinked

They found that each of the above was largely untrue. Their findings include the following:

Gender
- 54 % written by males
- Gender of blog author varies according to blog content - eg Personal Journals tend to be written by females (60%) while Filters, Knowledge-logs etc were more likely to be written by males (85%).

Age
- 59% written by people over 20 years old (many adult bloggers appear to be in their early 20's)
- Age of blog author varies according to blog content - eg Personal journals are more likely to be written by teens (60%) while Filters and knowledge-logs are almost always written by Adults (95%).

Comments
- 43% allowed comments
- Mean number of comments: .3. ie most entries receive no comments.

Links
- 69.5% of blogs link to external sites (excluding badges/buttons). ie this means 30% have no external links!
- 8.2% of entries link to news items
- 6.7% of entries link to other blogs
- Therefore most entries contain no links.

Other
- 70% are personal journals
- 70% written within the USA
- 91% are single author blogs

I gleaned these stats from here and here. The results are also here in the form of a powerpoint.

Comments

Page: