Research on blogs and bloggers

Six Apart who created Movable Type and Gawker Media, two of the best-known names in blogs and blog aggregation commissioned a study of bloggers. The research is based on analysis of over 2 million Internet users and their browsing patterns. They sampled blogs widely to get a sample of big and small blogs to come up with a picture of blog users in 2005.

The cut to the chase points of the study include:

• 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population


• Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each


• Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women


• Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections


• Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online