Simon’s Blog

There’s a huge amount of hype surrounding blogging. I can’t help feeling, though, that it’s much more niche than many people would have you believe. In other words, the numbers of readers, listeners and viewers of text, audio and video blogs are much, much lower than all the hype would suggest. Why do I think this? Simple - page view statistics.

Take an “A-List blogger” such as Tim Bray - his blog, Ongoing, is ranked #631 out of 50 million blogs tracked by Technorati . Looking at the stats for Tim’s blog, suggests that a single one of Tim’s posts may typically achieve as many as mid single-digit thousands of human page views per day, say 5,000 - 7,000 page views per post per day. What about one-off posts that get a lot of attention on aggregate sites? How much is “a lot” of attention? Well, if you look at Wordpress.com, which hosts over a quarter of a million blogs, by the time you’re down to the fourth or fifth most popular post of the day there, you’re typically looking only at mid-hundreds of page views per post per day. An order of magnitude lower than Tim’s blog. Looking at things another way, this time in terms of total numbers of unique human visitors to the entirety of a blog (not individual posts), this blog - which is a very much mid-level in terms of popularity, being ranked #265,222 out of 50 million by Technorati - gets on average around 1,500 different human readers per month visiting (as judged by unique IP addresses, and knocking out search engines and other robots).

All of these are really very low numbers. Now, there’s the odd blogger, such as Scoble (#21 out of 50 million on Technorati), that has much larger numbers of readers (in the tens of thousands of readers per post per day, I believe). But there’s no escaping the fact that, on the whole, what all this seems to mean is that almost no-one is reading almost any blog entries. I wonder what this means for businesses based around monetizing text, audio and/or video blogs; for example, through advertising? There seems to be close to zero volume at the moment.

I guess the investors in these companies must be predicting huge increases in the readerships/listeners/viewers of blogs, and the management of these companies must (should!) be largely focussed on increasing visitor volume. I’m not sure what the drivers of such large increases would be, but I’ll be fascinated to see how all this pans out. But just to scale you about numbers, web-sites that want to monetize their visitor volume typically have in excess of a million genuinely unique human visitors per week, to be worth mid single-digit millions of dollars…

By that reckoning, my blog is worth about $1600 - so, with that, I better get back to some real work!