According to the latest figures from comScore Media Metrix, blogs are not merely becoming mainstream, they are turning into a flood of information. Or, as iMedia Connection put it, "blogs are now as ubiquitous to the web as reality shows are to television."
Scary.
Nevertheless, comScore reports that the traffic to blogs continues to grow, up 56% over the past year to 58.7 million visitors, and that represents 34% of the total Internet audience.
Perhaps more importantly, in a very real way blogs are an indication of how the Internet is shifting from a medium where users gather information into a medium where they disperse information. Willy-nilly the web is tranforming itself into a democracy, a community of millions of voices and opinions.
It is early days, however. Blog visitors still skew young. Users between the ages of 12 and 17 are 21% more likely than average to visit blogs. But, as with other past Internet usage trends, the older population may soon be following in their mouse clicks.
Blog visitation also tend to come from higher income households, with households with incomes of least $75,000 and higher 8% more likely than the average to check out blog material.
"Blogs combine the power of word of mouth with the efficiency of the Internet," said eMarketer Senior Analyst James Belcher. "Companies that want to know what's being said about them should be monitoring the blogosphere, where word — good and bad — spreads quickly."
While comScore makes no claim to tracking the entire online universe of blogs, when it comes to blog networks the researcher found the top-rated blog network was Blogger.com, with 20.8 million visitors in May 2006. MySpace Blogs was second with 14.4 million visitors, and MSN Spaces was third with 9.6 million visitors.
For more information on blogs, read eMarketer's recently-published report The Business of Blogging.