22 May, 2004 8:07 AM
This surprises me a little as previous studies have found that the largest group of people blogging is teenagers - one would think that if this is the case that it would be mainly other teens reading the majority of blogs. There could be a few explanations for this result:
1. Teens have stopped blogging (and therefore reading blogs). Perhaps keeping a blog is not the cool thing to do any more - maybe they've moved on to the next greatest thing.
2. The survey attracted an older and wealthier respondent. I'm not sure how many teens would be running blog ads on their blog and therefore would have known to post about the survey. In fact now I think about it the only people that I saw advertising the survey were what could be termed as 'A-list' bloggers (like Buzz Machine) who blog mainly about politics and very 'grown up' subjects. I could be wrong here (I don't read many teen blogs myself) but I suspect the results would show a more accurate description of the readers of A-list bloggers than they would of the majority of bloggers with smaller readerships.
Actually this weakness of the survey is admitted to on the results page - 'To be clear, the survey's responses are a fragment of a sample of a subset. There are millions of bloggers. On Monday morning, I e-mailed roughly 50 of them -- some of the biggest bloggers, many of whom focus on politics and/or sell blogads -- suggesting they link to they survey. '
Still they are interesting results and worth a read.
Comments
Page:
And the Xanga and LJ communities tend to be more closed-loop, so that Xanga readers only read Xanga blogs, none of which probably had this ad, and few of which link to a blog that carried it.
Justin Baeder » 22 May, 2004 11:15 AM
I think there may be another issue here.
I don't think a lot of bloggers want ads on their blogs. I'd close down my blog before I'd accept an ad. Some probably wouldn't care one way or the other. Some would be targeted to carry them.
We know the "A' listers are US males, university educated. Maybe BlogAds needs to go after the teen bloggers.
They'd probably make a lot more money.
Bene Diction » 23 May, 2004 3:40 PM
Just growing out of the teenage years, I know, at least from my experience with my friends, that most teen bloggers tend to blog more on their daily lives and such. My apologies, I don't mean that in a negative way, but I had trouble finding blog sites in Xanga and LiveJournal, both which I had to create an account to leave comments, that were of interest to me or contained information that I was seeking. Also, many of the younger teens don't have the experience or knowledge to participate in a more "mature" level of blogging yet. It might be interesting and beneficial for the survey to outreach the teens by giving them some incentive. But nevertheless, the blogging community for teens is anything but dying out, in my opinion.
Henry » 8 June, 2004 11:16 AM
I wasn't aware of this survey Darren, thanks for the link.
I think that the limitation of any websurvey is who it's promoted to... when promoted on political blogs read mostly by adults, you'll get responses from politically minded adults. I think that the questions asked by this survey were targeted... I think that many teens would have been bored by the questions asked. They don't yet, for the most part, have a political affiliation, industry, or interest in many of the magazines inquired about in the Blogads survey.
I don't think teens have stopped blogging, not by a long shot. Hop on over to Xanga or LiveJournal or even Blogger for a couple of minutes and you'll come to that conclusion.
Michelle Johnston » 22 May, 2004 10:05 AM