Blogging Is Big Business… There Goes The Neighbourhood

If you think there is a lack of fake Blogs, Spam Blogs and otherwise unsurely types doing everything they can to make some dough off of Blogs, I have some bad news. It’s going to get a lot worse if the people at eMarketer are right about where the Blogosphere is headed.

Yesterday, eMarketer launched a new report titled, The Blogosphere – A Mass Movement from Grass Roots, which retails for $695 (if anyone has a copy and would like to flip me one, I won’t tell ;). Without knowing everything within the pages, eMarketer launched the report with an accompanying news item titled, Blogs Blossom Into A Big Business, with these findings:

– The number of people creating blogs in the US will reach over 35 million by 2012 — roughly 16% of the Internet population.

– By 2012, more than 145 million people — 67% of the US Internet population — will be reading blogs at least once a month.

– Last year (2007) 94 million people, or 50% of Internet users read Blogs at least once a month.

– US blog advertising will reach $746 million in 2012, up from $283 million in 2007.

Why are the numbers looking so promising? This is what eMarketer thinks:

"Like podcasts, blogs tend to appeal to specific audiences. Accordingly, much of the demographic targeting that marketers work so hard to achieve in the mainstream media is already done for them."

As we see the splintering of the mass audience into specific niches, it makes perfect sense that they are attracted to the type of content that is created in Blogs.

Here’s the bigger question: if Blogs do, indeed, get this kind of uptake, can the mass media be supplanted in some kind of world that moves an individual from watching one television channel with anything and everything on it to fifteen Blogs that cater to their specific interests?

Just wondering.