Everyone is talking about blogs, but who is reading them? Of all the types of Online Personal Media (which includes blogs, boards, usenet, photos, etc.), blogs are certainly the most hyped, so caution is called for. Are blogs really that big in the grand scheme of things? It turns out that the answer is yes, and no. The blogs at the very, very top of the pyramid (including Slashdot, BoingBoing, Engadget, etc.) get a very large readership. First, a look at the Alexa reach measurement (the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site - I've taken the 3 month daily average, and it is actually expressed in site users per million internet users).
We can also look at the visitor stats for a site whenever some sort of site meter (e.g. Site Meter) is present:
- DailyKos: 508,233 (average visitors per day, Site Meter)
- BoingBoing: 228, 723 (boingboing/stats)
- Gizmodo: average visits per day: 163,380 (Site Meter)
- Instapundit: 151,603 (Site Meter)
- Talking Points Memo: ?
- Slashdot: ?
- Fark: ?
- Engadget: ?
- Wil Wheaton: ?
- Kottke: ?
This gives a very different ranking. For example, DailyKos is gets twice as many visits as BoingBoing whereas the Alexa reach measurement has them almost equal.
Another measurement is the Bloglines measurement. When subscribing to a feed on Bloglines, you can see how many others subscribe to that feed:
- Slashdot: 35, 901
- BoingBoing: 22, 545
- Gizmodo: 18, 022
- Engadget: 15, 957
- Talking Points Memo: 4, 552
- Instapundit: 4, 197
- Fark: 1, 812
- Kottke: 1, 065
- Wil Wheaton: 617
- DailyKos: 511
I'm not sure I trust some of these numbers, especially that for DailyKos. Even so, BoingBoing jumps from 5 (Alexa) to 2, Talking Points Memo from 8 (Alexa) to 5 and Fark from 2 (Alexa) to 7.
The Alexa numbers put the top blogs on a par with quite substantial local press:
- post-gazette.com: 368.5 (daily paper circulation: 240, 930)
- mercurynews.com: 404
- siliconvalley.com: 120.5
Comparing these numbers with those for online message boards is tricky. Alexa is by domain, so we can only really take measurements of the large hosting systems in some cases. A small illustrative sample (including some of the higher ranked boards from big-boards.com):
This ad-hoc sample suggest that the biggest board hosting sites (of which ezboard is the grand-daddy - remember others are not represented due to the difficulty of doing Alexa rankings over different hosts or URLs) are still ahead of the top blogs in terms of visitors; smaller sites (honda-tech is a good example), receive traffic similar to the lower end of the elite bloggers.
The numbers above are far from scientific, but they do go a small way to understanding where blogs sit in the bigger picture of online destinations for community and personal media. They also show that different measurements present a very different view of the top bloggers and although the relative changes in position are small, as the measurements are not linear, they indicate quite substantial changes in how the blog might be perceived.