Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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April 05, 2007
Demographics of Visitors to Blogs
Yesterday I spoke at the excellent Blogging for Business conference in London. In answer to a question about the demographics, I provided some statistics on the profile of visitors to blog websites. I received a number of follow up questions about the data so thought I'd post the data here with some additional detail.
Blogs attract slightly more males than average for the UK online population and skew slightly young. Visitors to blog websites are also 34% more likely to be from London than average, as illustrated in the image below. The Mosaic Groups Urban Intelligence, Welfare Borderline and Municipal Dependency are all over-represented on blogs versus the online population indicating again that blog visitors skew young and cover all income groups.
Region Breakdown of UK Visitors to Blogs and Personal Websites, Four weeks to 31 March 2007. Representation Index Against the Online Population.
However, as I pointed out yesterday, looking at the category statistics can be a bit misleading. Depending on the blog, the demographic profile of visitors to blogs can vary dramatically. The top blog websites based on share of UK visits are free blog hosting websites such as Blogger, MySpace Blogs and Windows Live Spaces.
Let's look at three of the most popular individual blogs, based on UK visits. The Superficial, the celebrity gossip blog, attracts younger visitors from Wales and the West Midlands. In particular, those aged 18-24 are twice as likely as average for the online population to be on The Superficial website.
Engadget visitors are more likely to be aged 25-35 or 45-55 and be from the West Midlands or Northern Ireland. Visitors to Guido Fawkes' blog are 95% less likely to be 18-24 and 55% more likely to be 45-55. They are also more likely to be from London, Yorkshire and the Humber or Scotland.
Depending on the topic and the blog, demographics can vary widely for blogs. There is no "typical" blog reader just as there is no typical television viewer.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 02:31 PM
Posted to Blogs and Personal Websites
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Comments
cool stuff as always Heather and I enjoyed your piece in The Guardian on Thurs too. Good to see you at B4B and congrats again!
Steve
Posted by: steve clayton at April 6, 2007 09:30 AM
Heather, can you break out the recruitment oriented blogs?
Posted by: Chad Sowash at April 6, 2007 10:59 AM
Great information Heather, is there any way for you to distinguish recruitment related blogs from the UK blogging fray? Many thanks - Chad
Posted by: Chad Sowash at April 9, 2007 02:13 AM
Chad,
We can definitely do this. We offer demographic and lifestyle data at a category and at a site level. We don't have a category of recruitment blogs in Hitwise. We break out sites into just over 160 categories. Our clients can create custom categories or profile individual sites to get more granular views.
If you're interested in speaking to someone about the options for this, let me know.
Thanks, Heather
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at April 9, 2007 11:00 PM
Steve, Great to see you at Blogging for Business and good to see so many advocates for blogging from Microsoft. Sounds like the blogging culture is alive and well. :)
Thanks for your comment and kind wishes. See you again soon, I hope.
Heather
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at April 9, 2007 11:12 PM
Thanks for the useful data on blog readers Heather. I wondered if you had any predictions about how the number of people blogging in the UK will grow, and if you have information on the profile of the typical UK blogger?
Posted by: Amanda Lorenzani at May 16, 2007 11:40 PM
