This February 2004 study from Pew Research Center finds that, as of a summer 2003 survey, some 2% of the online U.S. population blogs. The study also notes that early data from 2004 indicates that figure may have gone up to as much as 7% of the population. According to my analysis, as laid out in greater detail in an article I wrote for iMedia, that 2% and 7% works out respectively to 2.5 million to 8.8 million people, based on Pew’s Deceber 2003 estimate of 126 million U.S. adults online.
The report looks at a range of people’s online activities, but if you prefer, you can skip right to the section on weblogs.
2.5 million to 8.8 million people actively blogging? I live near Los Angeles in a community with many high-tech workers. I interact with people from age 10 to people in their 60’s. Most are somewhere in the middle pretty evenly distributed from 21-50. Most of these people haven’t even heard of blogs. 2-5% of them are now active bloggers? I strongly doubt this number is accurate.
Comment by SG — April 15, 2004 @ 4:13 pm
BTW, I just glanced at my cranky comment and realized I didn’t give you a well deserved compliment on the site. Thumbs up! Nice and clean with relevant content, great job.
Comment by SG — April 15, 2004 @ 4:15 pm
SG, just to clarify, that wasn’t my estimate, it was an estimate based on research by the Pew Research Center. On the other hand, I don’t have such trouble believing it. It’s consistent with other research from Perseus that estimates that 4 million people are blogging just on the systems Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga (notably, that does not include Movable Type blogs, as well as other systems that are off-network). That research, based on numbers of active blogs registered on each of those networks, says 4 million were blogging in 2003 and 10 will be by the end of this year (although, those figures are worldwide). I think services like LiveJournal and Xanga are huge in the GenY set.
Comment by Rick Bruner — April 21, 2004 @ 9:54 am