Tuesday, February 22, 2011

NYT: some interesting data on blogging

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter - NYTimes.com

The headline (the link) isn't totally accurate to the content of the article.

It's true that blogging is less relevant to young people, who favor rapid fire social media like Facebook and Twitter,but

"While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent."

And it's true that blog readership in the U.S. has slowed, but

"Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million."

h/t TitusOneNine

3 comments:

The Archer of the Forest said...

I refuse to use Twitter. Nothing destroys what's left of American writing skills more than Twitter.

C. Wingate said...

I think perhaps what we're seeing is that blogspot et al. are being abandoned in favor of Facebook etc. for the kind of day-to-day journal kind of material. That's obviously going to mean some decline for the former but unless people give up writing much more than a few sentences, blogs will continue to be the medium of choice for medium length running comment. Indeed I sometimes see people pointing back to their blog posts on their Facebook posts.

TLF+ said...

LOL I saw that on your blog, Archer. I find that unless I'm scanning for interesting links or something, Twitter is pretty useless. I'm just not into the decoder ring lingo.

C. Wingate - that's an excellent point. In fact, I always put my blog post links up on fb & Twitter. I think it is hard for a blog to stand alone without some casting into the social media for readers.