52% of Internet Users Don’t Read Blogs. Oh, Really?

Earlier this week we spoke about an interesting study conducted by Jupiter Research for BuzzLogic social media analysis company and blog advertising network. The most important thing the study focused on was the influence that blogs enjoy over their audiences in making people trust the ads they display on the blogs and trust their words when considering purchase of a product. And of course this was of particular interest to the blogosphere as we felt kind of flattered when we were told that we actually enjoyed some influence.

But there was one question in the survey that seemed to be overlooked in our reviews since bloggers tend to use the short summaries of studies instead of reading the entire documents. That question was about the percentage of people who read blogs at all. And to me this one seems to be of even higher importance since if bloggers influence someone we should be better off actually understanding how many people are impacted by that influence at all. And unfortunately the results are far from rosy in this particular case.

As part of the study over 2,200 people interrogated by Jupiter Research answered a question to understand their involvement with blogs: “Thinking about the past year, about how often, if at all, did you typically read a blog or blogs?” Respondents had to choose one answer and the results seem to be more than disappointing to me as a blogger with a huge 53% of online population claiming not to read blogs at all and only 3% of the internet users reading blogs multiple times per day.

Given the fact that all the social media tools like Twitter or FriendFeed constantly expose us to content from a variety of blogs, I’d really not want to think that all the people that I talk to every day about content published on a variety of blogs actually belong to that small 3% share of the entire world wide web population. I can’t help but feel sorry for the entire blogosphere and social media crowd that is supposed to be almost neglected by an average internet user if we believe the results of this study.

But as with any survey where people are actually supposed to answer questions, I think there will be a certain level of subjectivity in the replies. There are lots of factors that could make a person choose one answer over another and the most important one could be the fact that respondents simply failed to realize they were reading blogs and thought they were browsing a traditional website when in reality they were on a blog.

I believe it may be partly due to the professional approach some bloggers have adopted towards their blogs (mainly they are those bloggers who earn money blogging - not numerous but still - or engage in promotion of their professional services by blogging on professional topics). People expect that blogs are what they are supposed to be - online journals hosted on Wordpress.com or Blogger.com where a friend or a family member you are interested in following shares recent news or photos maybe. So when such people arrive to a blog like TechCrunch or Huffington Post from search results on Google or any other search engine, they consume the information available without actually realizing they are actually on a blog.

And I have a feeling that blogs have penetrated many of the online properties everywhere too deep for the huge 53% of internet users to avoid landing on a blog post for a whole month. For example, popular internet portals like Yahoo or AOL often send visitors to blogs right from the homepages and those people that click through to a blog post don’t even notice that Yahoo or AOL has been mean enough to direct a regular visitor to a scary blog post instead of a reliable article on a newspaper’s site.

Besides, we should not forget that many of the major newspapers now have reporters/journalists actually blogging on chosen topics in dedicated sections of their websites and even following some of the traditional blogging patterns like expressing their personal opinion instead of trying to be as objective as a reporter is supposed to be. And of course a visitor to the New York Times website may simply not notice the fact that Bits or Freakonomics are blogs belonging to the newspaper and not just some regular articles.

And should I also mention the number of blogs aggregated to services like Google News and Yahoo News where people can arrive to a blog post on a hot news topic without thinking it is actually a process of visiting a blog?

Basically I myself tend to feels that blogs of various types have already penetrated many fields of the online activities deep enough not to notice it and not to realize that a web surfer can land on a blog post without even realizing it - given the professional nature of content and a variety of online properties sending people to blogs in this or that manner.

So I think here the situation is very similar to how people think they don’t use RSS when in reality many of the things they do online are powered by RSS with RSS serving as a technology bringing the content they need to them without making them understand it is actually called RSS.

I suspect same may be valid for blogs as well with people often failing to realize they are on a blog when they actually are. And I honestly feel that it is way too hard to avoid visiting a blog now and then if you do anything in addition to checking emails online. What is your opinion: is it possible that 52% of all internet users in the US actually manage to avoid blogs completely or is it that they just don’t realize that they do read blogs?

Photo by pheezy used under Creative Commons