Firetop

There’s a factor often overlooked by media companies when they write about the ‘amazing blogosphere’ and that’s abandonment rates. If we’re to believe research findings quoted in the Guardian this year, there are nearly 7 million bloggers in the UK. Taking this figure at face value it would seem that blogging is being done by 1 in 9 of us Brits. However, what these research figures don’t tell you is that the large majority of these blogs are ‘hosted blogs’ and go unused or are abandoned within weeks of being created. A hosted blog is one which is held on a portal such as MySpace, MSN Space, Blogger or LiveJournal – just register and hey-presto ‘new free blog’. When I registered for MySpace last week (to finally see what all the fuss was about) I was given my own blog instantly, on which I wrote ‘I already have a blog at firetop.co.uk’ and I’ll never use that tool again… it will be recorded as a ‘MySpace blog’ in press release figures though I suspect.

According to a survey of blog usage by Perseus Development Corp ‘26% of all hosted-blogs are likely to be one-day wonders, with no postings seen again on subsequent days’. What this means is that hosted blogs are so easy to establish that the conversion rate to launch is high, but the conversion to becoming a ‘regular blogger’ is in fact much lower. Perhaps they’re created out of curiosity or simply because they’re an add-on to another service such as a social networking tool. Bloggers that host their own blogs (like me) invariably continue with it because it takes more effort to get such a tool off the ground in the first place – application installation, configuration, template design etc.

The ‘average duration a hosted blog is maintained for’ in the Perseus survey was 126 days (nearly four months). A staggering 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months - either permanently or temporarily abandoned. Active blogs were updated on average every 14 days. 2% of the hosted blogs were updated on average at least once a week, fewer than 1.2% were updated daily. This suggests that of all the figures in the press, there might actually be only 224,000 regular (daily/weekly) bloggers in the UK – a little different to the astounding 7 million geeks we had supposedly all become (yes I accept I’m a geek).

Apparently blogs are predominantly the domain of women, 56% of blogs being started by females with a higher likelihood of being maintained by them too. Does this tell us what we’ve always suspected – that women like nothing more than a good gossip? If you look at the reading material available on newsagents’ shelves – Heat, TV Quick, Glamour etc. I think there’s some evidence to back that up. Although it also suggests that I might have similar attributes… me a gossip? I don’t think so.

Finally, the Perseus survey also found that 92.4% of hosted blogs were created by people under the age of 30 (again mostly women), this is probably to be expected, the Internet is still predominantly the domain of the young – although my mother did manage to get one off the ground for about 2 weeks this year (a hosted blog… with AOL - the land of silver surfers) so she’d be in the 7.6% of bloggers over 30.

Blogger anonymity isn’t as prevalent as I thought it would be according to an MIT survey I came across - 55% of respondents provide their real names on their blogs and the same survey found that 34% of respondents knew other bloggers who had gotten in trouble with family and friends over their blog postings. 12% knew of other bloggers who had gotten in legal or professional problems. Perhaps these statistics are an indication that anonymity is a better option! Another indicator that blogging may not be as popular as suggested is that a search of ‘blogging insurance’ brought back no pay per click adverts for cash hungry insurers. I was expecting to see a whole raft of libel protection services, possibly a gap in the market there?

Technorati Tags: blog usage, blog statistics, hosted blogs

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