New Study - The State of the Blogosphere

Another interesting report out from eMarketer this week for your pile of things to read this weekend. I do think the increased number of reports that we are seeing that are relevant to our business model does speak to the fact that we are in the right space.

This is an updated study that looks at the size of blogs, trends in personal publishing and how it fits into social networking.

I found a few interesting points that really hit home:

• 112MM users read blogs in the US today (about 50% of the total audience)
• Estimates increase blog readership to 60% by 2014
• 26MM people blog (have an active blog) - note we believe there are over 100MM blogs online today, though most are inactive or have no traffic
• Blogging is up overall, though younger segments are less likely to blog now there are social networking platform
• The shift in younger audience is not really a loss of blogging, it is more technology coming in to solve a problem that was being temporarily solved via a blogging platform
• In 2009, of the 'US Social Media Users', over 85% used Facebook, 46% used MySpace (down about 35% versus 2009), and 15% blogged
• Rates of blog reading will rise through 2014. The increases will be driven by a confluence between blogs and traditional media and by growing use of corporate blogs.
• Social media will steer traffic to blog sites. However, this will be a double-edged sword, as social venues also inhibit blogging by providing users with powerful platforms of self-expression.
• Blogging platform Typepad estimated that including a Facebook “like” widget to a blog sidebar resulted in a 50% increase in traffic from Facebook to that blog.
• Adding the Facebook widget to blog post footers resulted in a 200% traffic increase.

Understanding the Blogosphere

Pop Quiz of the Day...

Online Political Engagement

There has been an online revolution of sorts this year in the political world. A daily visit to my favorite site Digg reminds me daily of the Ron Paul Revolution. I actually like a lot of what Ron Paul talks about and really wish he had more of a chance, but he at least reminds us that you can challenge traditional thinking.

So I was running my regular Media Metrix reports for the month and I took a look at the Politics category, given this is the topic of the month in our household. When I ran the metrics on the candidate websites, I was actually amazed at the level of engagement by some of the candidate’s online users.

First of all, if you look at the total minutes spent on all the candidates’ websites, from the online US population in the month of January, 24% of total time was spent on Ron Paul’s website, which was second only to Obama’s 28%.

This is amazing. Time spent on a website is a great measure of engagement and loyalty. The share of time spent across all the sites would lead you to the conclusion that the candidates with the most spent on their site have the highest potential for success.

When you see Obama’s numbers, this is true. But Ron Paul is an amazing story. Though he draws almost a quarter of the total time in the category, he only reaches less than 10% of the total users in this category, and only 5% of the total politics category. This is really an amazing data point as it tells you that not only does Ron Paul engage with his users, but their engagement is 2-3x the average, and in the cases of pages visited on the site, it is 5x or more.

Marketers and publishers online would love the opportunity to engage and interact with their customers and users the way Ron Paul has been able to do so. Agencies are paying billions of dollars online every year to create trust and a brand of conviction that people will interact with their precious time and energy.

Obama seems to draw a very loyal group of users, and this story alone would be interesting to discuss at your next cocktail party, but this year there is something even more compelling. I guess it is called the Ron Paul Revolution.

And The Winner Is...

One of the things I really enjoy early each month is the release of the new Media Metrix domain key measures report. There is such a wealth of knowledge in this report and I could spend hours and hour just going through it to better understand what people are doing online.

One of the first things I look at each month is who has ended up at the bottom of the list. These guys are the losers of the Media Metrix race. They are in dead last. Now, I am not sure they really are losers, since there are millions of even smaller sites that don't show-up on the report, so these guys probably are happy to be on the list and consider this a win.

So the winner 'last in the list' site for December 2007 is EGYPT.TRAVEL with 12K UVs in the US and over 14K visits in the month. This site is more of an advertising focused site around traveling to Eqypt. The site does apper to be set-up as a pop-up, so I am not sure the traffic is 100% legit, but it at least has content.

Check it out, they are the winners for December 2007!

Bush's Approval Rating...

I am amazed it is so high. Read more here

Industry Thought: Cookie Deletion

comScore put out a recent report on the effects of cookie deletion on the measurement of website traffic. The numbers are pretty amazing, as they show the real potential for web analytics companies such as Webside Story, Omniture, and Coremetrics to over count traffic by a factor of 2.5x at least.

You can read the release here, but the real important note to take back from this is the following… The numbers you are reporting from your website are not correct. They are at least 2x over stated, and probably even more overstated for more technical sites and blogs.

Web users today are complex. They visit multiple sites per day; they connect with embedded content and subscribe to syndicated content. There are multiple browsers per user, and there are more technical tools to help consumers than ever before.

So, as a rule of thumb, you should at least divide your web analytics numbers by ½ if not more to get a true estimate of your visitors. Yes, it is a hard pill to swallow, but it is better to be realistic about what is happening on your site.

I have a ton of experience in this space, and I can tell you that the 2.5x number is understated slightly. When I have worked with publishers, advertisers, and even web analytics companies, everyone knows this is true, they just don’t want to talk about it.

Well, it is time to talk about it. Look at the bright side, the number of visits per unique user is higher than you thought. This is a good thing, it means people like what you are doing, and it means that you have a good chance to build your audience if you can get more people to visit your site.

Just a thought.