Research firm comScore Networks, at the request of blogging companies Six Apart and Gawker Media, has just announced the results of a survey detailing blog visits during the first quarter of this year. The results show a 45 percent in traffic from the same time last year.
comScore’s numbers, published in this PDF report, found that nearly 50 million Americans, or around 30 percent of the total U.S. Internet population, visited blogs during the time measured. Other key findings include four individual blogs each having more than 1 million visitors, the top blog categories being political and lifestyle, that blog readers tend to be young and wealthy and that blog readers visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average.
“The fact that we found 30 percent of the online population to have visited blogs clearly underscores the commercial importance of consumer generated and driven media,” said Dan Hess, senior vice president of comScore Networks. “It’s noteworthy that while the blog audience is already quite large and growing, its demographic composition relative to the total population will appeal to many marketers.”
