Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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October 25, 2006
Blog Stats from e-Consultancy's Blogging for Business Event
This morning I attended the well run Blogging 4 Business training event hosted by e-consultancy's Craig Hanna and promised that I'd post the stats I was sharing on this blog.
The rankings are at the end. First, I want to show you a cloud diagram I created to show how people reach blogs and where they go after. It's not that sophisticated - but it's a start and I welcome feedback.
The following image shows the upstream categories for blogs, with the font size representing the share of upstream UK visits from that category to blogs. You can see clearly that social networks and search engines account for the lion's share of UK visits to blogs. Last week, the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category (which is dominated by social networking sites MySpace and Bebo) accounted for 25.6% of upstream UK visits to the Blogs and Personal websites category. Search Engines accounted for 22.1% of upstream visits. The Shopping and Classifieds category accounted for 3.4% of visits and the News and Media category for 5.9%. (The categories listed - as some of them are in very small font are - areEmail Services, Games, News & Media, Television, Multimedia, Politics, Sports, Photography, Business & Finance, Shopping & Classifieds, Blogs and Personal Websites, Social Networks and Education).
From looking at this, you might think that blogs are a separate conversation, maybe a tangent. Downstream visits paint a very different picture. The following cloud diagram represents the share of downstream visits from blogs with the font size based on the percentage of visits to the category.
Retailers may think they are not part of the conversation on blogs - but they are. Brands are mentioned on blogs every day and 6.3% of downstream visits from blogs go to Shopping & Classifieds websites. I should also define a couple of the other categories on the diagram - Multimedia is in our Entertainment category and includes video sharing sites (namely YouTube), Television includes websites for television programs and stations, and Games includes such popular websites as RuneScape and Second Life.
Okay, now some more stats...
- One in every 200 UK internet visits went to a blog last week. I reminded the audience that a lot of people say they don't know what blogs are (or RSS feeds) but that doesn't matter so much. Blogs are fairly mainstream appealing to a cross section of the UK population. Whilst the profile of visitors to the Blogs and Personal Websites category skew slightly young, this is in part due to the dominance of the free hosted solutions for creating blogs. Which brings me to the rankings...
- I showed a table with the top 20 websites in our Blogs and Personal Websites category based on share of UK visits last week. Note that we are tracking website visits and not RSS feeds. The list hasn't changed much since I last blogged on this. The top blogs are free blog hosting sities, then mainstream media such as the BBC and Guardian Unlimited. There are the political bloggers such as Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes and the celebrity gossip blogs such as The Superficial.
Other speakers today included:
- Andy Budd who kindly offers his excellent presentation here.
- Debbie Weir who offers sage advice for corporate blogging on her blog. (In particular during the Q&A, when asked about how to get internal support to start a corporate blog, she advised starting an internal blog first. Show the success of that to help break down barriers. A really good tip that I hadn't heard before.)
- And Mark Rogers from Market Sentinel who challenged the notion that links are the best way to measure authority when each business and person has so many niche products and interests.
Craig Hanna has also promised to blog about the event on the e-consultancy blog, so stay tuned.
Update: Craig has blogged about the event.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:14 PM
Posted to Blogs and Personal Websites
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Posted by: Ding Pastrana at October 26, 2006 10:34 AM
"One in every 200 UK internet visits went to a blog last week."
Very interesting. How is this trending, up or down?
Posted by: Mack Collier at October 26, 2006 12:16 PM
Mack,
Visits to blogs has remained pretty flat in the past year. Now that we are back into the busy school season in the UK, we may start to see it trend up.
Remember though, we are reporting the share of all UK internet visits to the category. The blogs category is growing on pace with the web as a whole. Also, this counts blogs that were active and have dropped off. Some blogs are growing very quickly. The average growth for the category is still 1 in every 200 internet visits.
Thanks for the comment.
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at October 27, 2006 06:22 AM
I've been trying to think of a way to generate web traffic through social networking, Blogging defiantly seems to be the way forward for Businesses .
I think it also gives the company a friendly face and encourages communication.
Posted by: Rob Farrow at October 31, 2006 02:23 AM
I wanted to shine a little light on the point I was making about how online reputation can be measured.
Online reputation is about authority.
Authority is not a function of the number of links to you.
Authority is subject specific. You may be very authoritative on cars, but have no authority on motorbikes.
Your authority is a function of who links to you in the context of a topic in which you seek authority.
Your authority is a function of how many of those who have authority in that topic choose to link to you.
Your authority is a function of the words other authorities choose when they link to you.
That is why Technorati's "authority" measure is not about authority. It is about popularity. It is the AltaVista model of search circa 1999 where links equated to prominence in results - a throwback to the pre-Google world.
Our advice to brands and marketeers is
a) find out who is authoritative in the field in which you seek authority;
b) find out who they are and how they think;
c) try to get them to notice you, to talk about you and (ideally) to endorse you.
These ideas are not new, they are very much accepted in the academic world, where citation analysis is used as a way of evaluating academic rewards. What is new is that we are applying them to the web,
Posted by: Mark Rogers at November 1, 2006 02:13 AM
Hi, all really interesting. I am definitely a big fan of blogs in a B2C or P2P world. I have recently been appointed to the role of marketing director for a technology consulting firm. We are pure B2B. Can anybody point me in the right direction of great examples of blogging in this sort of environment? Do you have a view as to whether it would add value? I can see it working within our intranet portal but I'm struggling to find the value in it for the public domain.
Posted by: David at November 16, 2006 12:58 AM
David - the best example of a B2B blog I can think of is Hitwise. :) We are a B2B business and the blog has been a terrific way for us to engage with our clients, reach out to other bloggers and influencers in the web analytics space and to build our brand awareness online.
I am sure there are many other examples - this is one I am very familiar with.
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at November 16, 2006 08:44 AM
