Social Media Marketing eBook

Facts From BusinessWeek’s Social Media and Blogging Article

BusinessWeek first published an article entitled “”Blogs Will Change Your Business” in May, 2005. Yesterday they updated the article with twenty-odd pop-up edits and notes, which reflect the changing social media sphere. I thought it would be handy to gather some of the more interesting facts together–we might use some in a future version of the book:

• “According to Forrester, 11.2% of online adults in the U.S. publish a blog at least once a month. Of the same group, 24.8% read a blog and 13.7% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• “The numbers are higher for youths. Of online youths, 20.8% publish a blog, 36.6% read a blog, and 26.4% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• Technorati Chairman Dave Sifry says that the site monitors about 112 million blogs, but only about 12.3 million of those have been updated in the last two months.
• FeedBlog CEO Kevin Burton thinks two to four million blogs is a more accurate number.
• “Sifry estimates that fully 99% of the blog posts reaching search engines are spam.” Does that mean that 99% of the aforementioned 12.3 million blogs are splogs? Probably not, because splogs would generate posts at a much higher rate than humans. Plus, Technorati tries hard to keep splogs out of those that they monitor.
• Tim Bray “says that 4,000 bloggers at Sun, about 10% of the workforce, have had virtually no problems.” Of course, your technologists are going to be savvier than the average blogger.
• Mike Kaltschnee runs Hacking Netflix, and gets treated like a journalist by both Netflix and Blockbuster. His site gets 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors per month.
• “Research company eMarketer reckons the market for podcasts in the U.S. was 18.5 million people in 2007, and will reach 28 million in 2008. Advertising revenue for podcasts totaled $165 million last year.”
• Federated Media, an ad network for about 150 popular blogs, earned $22 million in 2007.

Tags: blogging, Businessweek, future, past, social media, trends