Participation in the Blogosphere: Reading, Writing and Commenting

Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, noted that Charlene Li, of Forrester Research, reported that 24% of Gen Yers read blogs (where Gen Y is comprised of 18-26 year-olds).  I was surprised that the number wasn't far higher, given earlier studies I'd read from the Pew Internet & American Life project.  I posted a comment on the Naked Conversations blog, but got thinking further about the numbers, and so decided to bring it on back home to this blog for further analysis (or, at least, speculation).  I'll start off with my earlier comment on Shel's post, with the dates of the reports inserted, as I believe the chronology is important here:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project's (PIP) recent report on Bloggers: a portrait of the new Internet storytellers (July 19, 2006) estimates that 8% of U.S. adult internet users are now blogging (writing blogs), and 39% of U.S. adult internet users are reading blogs. An earlier report on Internet Penetration and Impact (April 26, 2006) estimated that 73% of U.S. adults are Internet users ... which, combined with the most recent report, suggests that approximately 28% of all U.S. adults read blogs.

Another earlier PIP report on Teen Content Creators and Consumers (November 2, 2005) estimated that 19% of U.S. teens (ages 12-17 ... er, Gen Z?) were writing blogs and 57% were reading blogs, so I would have expected that a far larger proportion -- say, 40-45% -- of Gen Y would be reading blogs.

Oh, and FWIW, the most recent report also notes that 82% of bloggers post comments ... but I wonder what percentage of the overall U.S. adult internet user population posts comments on blogs. I suspect that people who write their own blogs are far more likely to post commments on others' blogs.

I went back to the Pew site, and browsed around some of their other reports.  The Generations Online report (January 22, 2006) had just the data I was looking for: 41% of Gen Yers read blogs (and 20% create blogs).  I'm including a table from page 3 of the report below:

The data in the table is based on surveys conducted by Pew in January 2005, May-June 2005, and September 2005, and the margin of error is +/- 3%.  I have not purchased the Forrester report (Pew reports are available for free), so I cannot explain the discrepancy, but the Pew numbers are more closely aligned with my intuitions about the growing prominence of the blogosphere.

I'm also curious about another discrepancy.  Pew published an earlier report on trends in Internet Activities (December 5, 2005), in which they estimated that 9% of adult Internet users create a web log or "blog" (this was based on a September 2005 survey).  The most recent report on Bloggers (July 19, 2006) says that "8% of internet users age 18 and older, or about 12 million American adults, report keeping a blog."  Certainly, this discrepancy is within the margins of error, but it still suggests that the number of U.S. adult bloggers has been relatively flat over the past year.

Meanwhile, in the most recent State of the Blogosphere (August 2006), David Sifry of Technorati reports that the blogosphere continues to grow at a steady clip:

• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time

So if the number of U.S. adult bloggers is remaining fairly constant, and yet the number of blogs is doubling every 6.5 months (a Perseus study on The Blogging Geyser from April 2005 suggests similar growth patterns), does this mean that all the growth in the blogosphere is from U.S. kids, people who live outside the U.S., U.S. adult bloggers who are creating additional blogs, and/or spam blogs (splogs)?

I read recently that MySpace has 100 million members, and I suspect that many of those members are not adults, but I don't know if MySpace is included in the Technorati statistics (it was explicitly omitted from the Perseus survey).  Technorati does note the growth of number of posts in non-English language blogs, so I imagine there is, likewise, growth in the number of blogs that are non-English language (and presumably, many of those are outside the U.S.).  Still, I'm rather puzzled about whether there is, or is not, growth in the number of U.S. adult bloggers ... and if there is, why was that not found in the Pew surveys?

The Pew surveys do show that the number of blog readers is on the increase.  The September 2005 survey showed that 27% of U.S. adult internet users read someone else’s web log or "blog".  The July 2006 report states that 39% of internet users age 18 and older, or about 57 million American adults, report reading blogs, an increase of 45% in one year.  And, if the overall population of blog readers has increased by 45%, and the number of Gen Y blog readers was 41% a year ago, the number of Gen Y bloggers may be close to 60% ... 2.5 times more than the estimate of the Forrester Research report.

I found some blog comment frequency statistics at Aksimet, which shows the number of spam comments (spomments?) far outstripping "legitimate" comments.  I'm not sure whether or how they were counting compliment spam (short comments from sploggers that say things like "nice post" and include a link back to a splog).  I also found a post by Scott Mitchell with some statistics about the time distribution of comments on his own blog.  Unfortunately, though, I still have not found any more data about the number of people who have commented on blogs -- aside from the aforementioned 82% of bloggers who comment on others' blogs -- or the frequency with which people comment on blogs. 

So why do I care so much about this comment stuff?  I earlier noted that posting comments was one mechanism people could use for filling buckets online:

Each of us has an invisible bucket. It is constantly emptied or filled, depending on what others say or do to us. When our bucket is full, we feel great. When it's empty, we feel awful. ...
Every drop in that bucket makes us stronger and more optimistic.

I elaborated a bit more on the positive emotional impact of comments (and links) in a recent post on how blogs are the perfect platform for sharing love online.  And in another earlier post, on living without attachments, I noted Noah Kagan's more pithy way of expressing this sentiment: "comments make me orgasm" (I believe Noah is a member of Gen Y). 

I guess this question is particularly prominent for me at the moment because I've received a number of very nice emails recently about my post on the fabulous efforts of a small group of dedicated volunteers in building a community around football and food on Bainbridge Island.  I didn't know why the people sending emails weren't simply posting comments (although I did receive a nice comment from Susan on the blog post).  One of the people who sent email noted that "we’ve never been blogged before", so I imagine that it may be a matter of familiarity or comfort with blogs (vs. email) as a channel of participation.  And, if comments and emails are different means for giving each other strokes online, then this is just another manifestation of "different strokes for different folks".

Perhaps "stroking online" will be the topic of some future study.  Meanwhile, working through all of this helps me recognize an opportunity to practice blogging without attachments (to comments).