Media Callibration: Estimating Blogosphere Size From TV Viewership

The US Superbowl (the final of the national American Football competition) attracts approximately 90MM viewers. This number indicates the number of pairs of eyeballs watching the match. If we count these viewing events (number of people watching a match), then the number for the entire World Cup is somewhere around 30 billion (yes, more people than on the planet).

Bloggers are reacting as follows:

It seems like there is an opportunity to do something here. For example, we believe that there is a relationship between blog mentions and movie sales (movie sales being an estimate of audience). What can the TV viewership (let's pretend it is an exact science) tell us about counting blog postings (which we might assume is currently open, especially when considering the international scene).

The simplest model would be to assume that each viewing event (v) caused a blogging event (b) with probability p. We could get more sophisticated by estimating the probability that the viewer was a blogger, and then the probability that the blogger would write a post. Taking it to the next stage, we could estimate the probabilities conditioned on the country, age, etc. of the blogger.

Well - it seems like there is something in there. I'm not going to do this on a Wednesday evening, however, so if some kind soul would carry on, I'd be most obliged.