Who are you?
: Major kudos and thanks to Blogads’ Henry Copeland for creating the first major survey of blog readers. Of course, the 17,159 who responded are not a scientific sample — and they spring from the bloggers who plugged it — but it is a large sample and thus the numbers yield some neat surprises. See Henry’s summary and the results here.
This survey shows that blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.
Moreover, blog readers are more cyber-active than I’d hoped: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:
50% have spent more than $50 online on books.
47% have spent more than $500 online for plane tickets.
50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate, and 5% have contributed more than $1000. (Only 25% of NYTimes.com readers have contributed anything online in the last year.)
Blog readers are media-mavens: 21% subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, 15% to the Economist, 15% to Newsweek and 14% to the Atlantic Monthly….
[B]log readers are united in their apathy about traditional news sources: 82% of blog readers say that television is worthless or only somewhat useful as a source of news and opinion. 55% percent say the same about print newspapers. 54% say the same about print magazines.
Meanwhile, 86% say that blogs are either useful or extremely useful as sources of news or opinion. 80% say they read blogs for news they can’t find elsewhere. 78% read because the perspective is better. 66% value the faster news. 61% say that blogs are more honest. Divided on so much else, blog readers appear united in their dissatisfaction with conventional media and their rabid love of blogs.
A few more highlights:
: You’re well-to-do: 38.1 percent make more than $90k. From a biz perspective, that’s wonderful.
: You’re influencers (or think you are): only one quarter consider themselves “one of the guys/gals” while the rest are “a lone wolf” or “an opinion maker.”
: A plurality of the respondents, 40.2 percent, are Democrats. Now that’s affected by the blogs that plugged this but, still, it shows this isn’t necessarily the conservative/libertarian ghetto it’s often assumed to be.
: This is not just a world of bloggers talking to bloggers: 79.1 percent of the respondents do not blog themselves.
Thanks, Henry.
