Blogs Not Going Away: State of the Blogosphere 2010

Back in September this year, in a two part series of posts on Technorati’s latest State of the Blogosphere survey – see here and here – I encouraged readers to join me in participating in the survey. I also shared what I had been able to glean about these surveys, going back to the first one in 2004.

The report of the 2010 survey is now available.

Some key findings (see summary for more details)

• blogs are in transition, “no longer an upstart community,now with influence on mainstream narratives firmly entrenched”
• sharing of blog posts is increasingly done through social networks
• the blogs of others remain the primary influence on bloggers, far more than social networks or other media
• significant growth of mobile blogging
• influence of women and mom bloggers on the blogosphere, mainstream media, and brands
• bloggers and consumers optimistic about blogging’s future

The publishing format continues the practice begun in 2009 (for the 2008 report) of setting out the report findings over several “days”, notionally, in that in 2009 although the Introduction appeared on August 21, all the “Day” sections, from Day 1 to Day 5, appeared actually on the one day, October 13. The dates make more sense this year, with the Introduction and Day 1 published on Nov 3, then Days 2 and 3 on Nov 4 and 5 respectively.

The various topics covered are listed under the several days:

Day 1 — WHO: Bloggers, Brands and Consumers
Day 2 — WHAT: Topics and Trends
Day 3 — HOW: Technology, Traffic and Revenue

For anyone who likes graphs, this survey report should be a particularly enjoyable read, as there is a plethora of graphs.

The graphs do a particularly good job of breaking out the findings across the four categories of bloggers nominated for the study: Hobbyist, Part Timer, Corporate, Self Employed. An example is in the image below, illustrating findings on the question of whether Twitter is seen as having been a more or less effective driver of traffic to a site than a year previously: I thought it quite instructive that the perceptions were pretty consistent across the different categories of bloggers.

I was particularly interested to read the findings on the question of how blogs are perceived to have helped the businesses of part timers and self employed. In rising order of importance, the most value is perceived as being:

• asked to speak at industry conferences as a result of blog
• helped company be seen as a thought leader within its industry
• prospective customers have read blog and purchased products or services
• blogger has much greater visibility in their industry because of blog

I can’t see why corporate bloggers were left out of that segment. I would find it very interesting to know how the corporate bloggers perceived their blogging in terms of helping their business. Perhaps part of the challenge in gleaning that information would be in finding a framework to distinguish all the different types of “corporate” blogging roles, from the CEO blogger to the blogger or bloggers in marketing or customer service. If anyone knows of another study that provides some of that data I would love to know about it.

All in all, this is a very interesting report and for my part I expect it to repay further and closer study. My personal plea to Technorati (yeah, I know they are listening to me, LOL) is that for next year’s report they produce a downloadable, single PDF version: this business of clicking through pages may have some purpose, but it is a pain.

Image credits: screenshot images – see Technorati Creative Commons license.