The Pew Internet & American Life Project (who I love by the way) published a report yesterday saying that 8% of internet users, or about 12M American adults, keep a blog. I had always guessed that number would be much higher, and while 12M is a lot, the fact that it represents only 8% is quite interesting.

It is interesting to look at the number of blog readers (39%, or 57 million American adults) and compare that to the existing blogs. If you do the simplest math possible (divide bigger number by smaller number) that means for every blog there are 4.75 readers. Which, incidentally is exactly the number of readers I have!

Also interesting (and from a prior survey) is that more than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30 and evenly divided between men and women. That seems expected, but how about the fact that more than half live in the suburbs? How about the fact that bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population? Sixty percent of bloggers are white, 11% are African American, 19% are English-speaking Hispanic and 10% identify as some other race. By contrast, 74% of internet users are white, 9% are African American, 11% are English-speaking Hispanic and 6% identify as some other race.

If you want to read all 33 pages, check out a [PDF] of the full report. And thanks Amy for pointing this out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 11:46 am and is filed under Culture, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.