James at everyhuman emailed me to day to let me know about a thesis that he’s just published on Blogging. He describes his research as follows:
To give a brief over view of the paper, it was written for people who have a basic understanding of Blogs. I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.
I carried out quantitative research by twice sending out a survey via email to 750 Bloggers who are ranked by Technorati. A total 174 Bloggers filled out the survey.
Some of his key findings included:
- 49% of survey participants use RSS readers to collect information for their Blogs
- 5% allow commenting on their Blogs
- 33% of the Blogs use Google AdSense for advertising
- 22% use BlogAds
In a 12 month period:
- 45% of bloggers did not generate any revenue at all from their blogs
- 40% generated under $5,000
- 4% generated over $100,000.
Of course it’s worth keeping in mind that the sample size was 174 so 4% is around 7 bloggers. One might argue both for or against whether this is a true representation of what all bloggers earn. I can’t see a breakdown of the types of bloggers surveyed so far in the paper but it would be interesting to see what type of spread of respondents there were in terms of topic, location and other demographics.
You can download the full thesis here (PDF)
