The size of citizens’ media
: The latest Pew Internet study starts to reveal the size of the growing citizens’ media movement.
Pew says that 44 percent of Americans — more than 53 million adults — have “used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”
: 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.: 17% have posted written material on Web sites.
: 13% maintain their own Web sites.
In multiple surveys, Pew has found that between 2 and 7 percent of adults have created blogs.
That is much bigger than I would have guessed. I never expect the creation — or even reading — of weblogs to reach a majority or anything close to it. I look at it another way: What is the proportion of Americans who, until now, ever wrote for a newspaper or wrote a book or appeared on TV? That’s really tiny. These new tools have opened up communication to those who want it and they are discovering it. Most people hate writing; most don’t think about serving a public. But now those who do can.
Pew also said that 11 percent of Internet users read blogs and that number is also much, much larger than I expected. Blogs are very new; they are niche; the niches are starting to add up to the size of a cable channel.
Finally, Pew said that 34 percent of those who read blogs post to them. This is a very interactive form (for those who allow it).
Remember last fall I posted AOL head Jonathan Miller saying that his users spend two-thirds of their time with content created by other users.
Citizens media is becoming an industry.
: Meanwhile, USA Today reports on the Pew study and asks one of the utterly unscientific polls it made famous: Do you blog? Total: 21 percent: 16.7 percent, as if now, say they blog and an additional 5.6 percent say they are blogging this.
: Charles R. Martin, the commenter and emailer who alerted me to the latest from Pew, adds this: “Remember when we were hearing that reading was going to be an obsolete skill? And letter writing…”
: I just added this in a comment at Lost Remote:
Put it in TV terms: weblogs have an 11 percent share (13 million viewers); not bad especially for something that is so new and that has absolutely no marketing behind it.Compare the number of weblog writers to the number of writers in major media: between 2.4 and 8.4 million. That’s an explosion of content from the people.
Look at the demographics in the Pew study; they are also impressive.
Who ever expected more than a percent of America to want to write and communicate with a public? Who expected a tenth of America to be reading these niche products of citizens’ media?
