Hitwise Intelligence - LeeAnn Prescott - US
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July 21, 2006
Politics, Celebrities and Gadgets: The Most Popular Blogs
Since joining the blogoshpere last fall, I've been closely tracking internet visits to top blogs online. While I know that Internet visits to blog websites is not necessarily a proxy for which blogs have the most subscribers through RSS, I think it's interesting nonetheless to see which blogs people are visiting most frequently. Hitwise has a category called Lifestyle - Blogs and Personal Websites, which contains over 2,000 sites. But since it includes MySpace Blogs, Blogger and other sites related to blogs, I created a custom category of the top English language blogs according to Technorati to see how they rank against each other in terms of US Internet visits.
With the exceptions of PostSecret and Engadget, the top ten most visited blogs are related to politics and celebrity gossip. I suspect that blogs like Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Michelle Malkin have such a large market share because visitors use them as news services, going there for frequent news updates with their favorite spin. Gossip blogs like The Superficial and Pink is the New Blog appeal to the voyeur in all of us, giving readers a daily fix of gossip beyond the weekly magazines and daily entertainment TV shows. Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo rank further down, but could be more likely to have more RSS readers than other blogs, given their tech focus.
Just how big is the blogoshpere? While my custom category is hardly a complete list, as it contains only 60 blogs, it accounted for 0.054% of Internet visits for the week ending July 15, 2006. The Lifestyle - Blogs and Personal Websites category accounted for 0.88% of Internet visits in that period. Compare that to the News & Media category, which accounted for 3.3% of Internet visits. As traditional news sites continue to build out RSS features, it will become increasingly difficult to make comparisons by looking at Internet visits, but for now, News & Media sites are still the dominant method of getting news online.
The market share of visits to these top 60 blogs has grown by 56% from June 2005 to June 2006, but as you can from the chart below, growth has leveled off in the past five months. What this data indicates to me is that the top blogs have more or less established themselves, and that growth of the blogosphere will largely be from smaller blogs, and will continue to fragment as the number of blogs grows.
Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 09:15 AM
Posted to Blogs and Personal Websites
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