Surprise, Surprise: Study Shows Top Blogs Claim Most Of Industry Revenue

Ever wanted to get a kind of ballpark figure of what the top blogs on the Net take in, financially speaking? We all know they’re popular as heck, and that the more eyes visiting their pages generally means more revenue. But just how much are we talking about?

An estimate gathered for a study using resources of both the University of Texas and the relatively well-known blog ad network Chitika, pegs the number at $500 million total revenue for the top 50,000 blogs for 2006. Distributed evenly, that comes out to a quaint $10,000 each, but considering there are both a head and a long, long tail to that aggregate figure, some in that 50k-strong lineup of course have much more, while the majority make do with much less. (If you wish to know how Texas U and Chitika decided what blogs made the list, Technorati is your answer.)

If you’re curious to know if any interesting tidbits are to be gleaned from the study, there are. For one, the partners in investigation discovered that the blogosphere has a greater-than-expected concentration of revenue at the topmost percentile. The 1% at the height of the industry laid claim to 20% of the $500 million pot. $100,000,000. If that’s not complete domination, I don’t know what is.

And, interestingly enough, if you expand your sights to look at the top 10-15% of the blogosphere (granted, just 50,000 blogs were included in the study, whereas millions reside on the Web today; all the same, this is one of the most accurate studies ever taken of the field), you’ll see that they altogether had a handle on 80-90% of the total revenue for 2006.

Thus, we come away with two truths:

1) There tends to be a general overestimation of revenue of blogs in the bottom 80% of the industry;

2) There tends to be a gross underestimation of revenue of the most popular.

There are several plausible reasons for this disparity, but one no doubt towers above all, and has to do with the number of blogs that can physically sit inside the bracket of the uber-popular.

If you take the 50,000 sample gathered together for the study, you’ll find that the top 1% constitutes 500 blogs. 500 blogs. That’s quite a collection, even if we’re talking international numbers. I myself regularly follow posts at perhaps a dozen choice publications, some of which likely do not find themselves situated within the topmost segment. Therefore, it really isn’t very difficult at all to imagine such a “select few” enjoying a 20% hold on the market, particularly as their traffic numbers literally dwarf those positioned “below the fold”. And one should also consider the likelihood that the vast majority of blogs do not have any revenue streams to speak of at all. That can definitely leave the final figures looking skewed.

Given that reality, the University of Texas-Chitika study is a welcome reminder that the blogosphere, despite its egalitarian atmosphere, does have a multi-tier, multi-class structure of its own. It’s just not so monumentally difficult to climb the ladder. Which is more than can be said of most other industries, on the Web and elsewhere.