Blogging Is Not Dead

Blogging is not dead and all Blogs are not created equal.

That was the general message you could pull out of the Technorati – State of the Blogosphere 2008 study that was released today.

While the numbers of how many Blogs (and what is a Blog) continue to brew, here’s what Technorati is telling us:

– 133 million Blogs indexed since 2002.

– 7.4 million Blogs had posts in the last 120 days.

– 1.5 million Blogs had new posts up in the last 7 days.

– 900,000 Blogs had new posts in the past 24 hours.

– 76,000 Blogs have a Technorati Authority of 50+.

In terms of making money from Blogging comes this information:

"The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month."

So, there are very few people making millions from Blogging.

And what about how brands stack up?

"Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the Blogosphere. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate).

Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers.

Companies are already reaching out to bloggers. One-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates."

There’s an interesting relation there. Brands are being mentioned a lot in Blogs, but Bloggers don’t seem to be pulling in enough traffic to justify heavy advertising spends. This becomes more of an issue of brand communication than anything else. Blogs rank heavily in search engines, people pay attention to search results and this has huge implications beyond how easy it is for the Blog property to monetize the space around the content.

It was also interesting to see the top two entertainment sites are Blogs (OMG and TMZ).

Here are some stats from the readership side:

From comScore Media Metrix (August 2008):

– Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US.

– Facebook: 41.0 million.

– MySpace: 75.1 million.

– Total internet audience: 188.9 million.

From eMarketer (May 2008):

– 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users).

– 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%).

So, while we’re all hot and bothered with micro-blogging platforms like Twitter and staring at newer shiny objects like FriendFeed, it would seem like Blogs are still relevant, powerful and growing.

Side thought: Do Internet users really even know what a Blog is anymore? We’ve all seen tons of websites built on the WordPress Blog publishing platform and do you think that average online surfer knows that TMZ, Tom Peters or One Degree are Blogs?

Is Blogging dead? What do you think?