Study: Small Bloggers

Figures. As I was buried deep in writing my Online Political Advertising post yesterday, which discussed the important role of bloggers in diseminating political ideas, The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results of a survey of bloggers that reinforces some of the points yesterday’s post. It also is the first study to take a look at long-tail bloggers whose audience is only a handful of family and friends.

The New York Times quoted the director of the project, Lee Rainie, in today’s paper:

“This is a decent portrait of the long tail of the blogosphere. These are the average, everyday folks who blog. They are different from the A-list bloggers who get so much media attention. This is the first attempt or one of the first attempts at a representative sample of bloggers.”

Also from that story:

Among the report’s findings was that while many well-known blogs are political in nature, 37 percent of bloggers use them as personal journals. Among other popular topics were politics and government (11 percent), entertainment (7 percent), sports (6 percent) and general news and current events (5 percent). Only 34 percent of bloggers considered blogging a form of journalism, and most were heavy Internet users.

Finally, the survey also interestingly found that bloggers are less white than the general Internet population. Sixty percent of bloggers are are white compared to 74 percent of the Internet; 11 percent are African-American, 19 percent are Hispanics who speak English, and 10 percent are members of another race.