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The ‘numbers’ of blog readers are bullshit

by Steven Hodson on November 3, 2008 · Comments

Perez Hilton

Image via Wikipedia

The other day Svetlana Gladkova over a Profy had an interesting post that took the flip side of a recently released study when she asked about the 52% of internet users that don’t read blogs. This led the TechWag blog to wonder if the time was here where readers didn’t know if it was a blog they were reading or not.

As interesting as those two related posts might be I’m going to go one step further and suggest that in the larger scheme of the web people couldn’t give a damn if what they are reading is a blog or if it is some mainstream media site.

Seriously, think about it. Does your best friend care what a site owner is calling themselves if the content is interesting and informative? Do kids care if Perez Hilton is a blog or just a really cool site full of gossip that interests them? When your mother or father click on a link do you really think they care if the endpoint is a blog or some newspaper site?

Probably not.

It only seems to the bloggers who seem to have this enormous need to qualify everything they post to the web with “I’m a blogger” instead of just being another writer with some news or information to share with our readers. It is as if we need that badge in order to make sure we differentiate ourselves from that terrible morally corrupt old media; or heritage media as the new term seems to be. The fact is that I think that the line between the two was blurred some time ago but we don’t want to let go of our uniqueness because we are afraid that if we do we will get lost in the noise.

I know from personal experience that the only time I even use the term blogger now is when talking online to people involved with the tech blogosphere. The rest of the time I tell people when they ask what I do - I write about technology and the Internet. It sure saves on trying to answer those quizzicle looks of what are you talking about.

Blogging as a profession may have come of age to a certain extent but that doesn’t mean that people will care. They just want to be able to find the news and information they want and have it presented to them in a professional and responsible way. They don’t care what it is called and really neither should we. Regular web surfers are blind to classifications because they don’t care and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. For them it doesn’t matter if it is a blog, a news site, a reference site or even a search engine just as they can find what they want easily.

We can take surveys until the cows come home but in the end whatever numbers they try and come up with for blog popularity don’t mean anything because the readers couldn’t care less about the name. They just care about the quality - and we should do the same.

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Tagged as: Blog, blogging, media, web 2.0

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  • chrispian
    Couldn't agree more. For years I've been calling these things "websites". Call me crazy.
  • PJ
    Blogs are becoming the pablum of the brain that TV was during the... well... during the last 40 years.
  • Steven, you are right on spot with this one as usually. I myself think I am obsessed with statistics because I think I still need to persuade myself that we are doing something useful in the tech blogosphere - thus the figures I find matter to me. But to a normal person I think there should be absolutely 0 difference of how the website is called - be it a blog or a news site - if the site provides the information needed. And we certainly should not care about educating the people so that they fully appreciated their involvement with blogs - the simple fact that they drop to our sites once in a while should be exactly what we need. Same as with RSS - there's no point in making people learn what RSS is but there's a real need in teaching people how to use it.
  • Very true, isn't Yhaoo start page a collection of news from blog? CNN?
    So let's cut this bullshit about people not reading blogs. If they don't read blogs, they don't read web-pages.
    It's 2009. Internet=Content, not the names we give to things.
  • I might think of a blog in terms of software and functions, but the people I talk to who don't work online still think of it as an internet journal or diary of some kind. If and when I hear it mentioned in that 'heritage' media it is usually in the context of amateur writing, so people also probably don't associate the word blog at all with professional-quality content.

    Anyway, its really hard to believe that 53% of internet users managed to go 12 months without reading a blog post. Good luck running a Google search without pulling up a few blog URLs in the results - and yeah, even these mainstream news websites are starting to incorporate more and more bloglike functions.

    Of course, I still use the word blog and blogging - when I'm talking to other bloggers! Its a cool piece of industry-specific jargon with a vague meaning, thats all.
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