Most Americans Don’t Read Political Blogs
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Age, Blogging, PollsWhile that headline may be true, I’ll get into why it’s an unfair spin soon enough.
First, Reuters has their dreary spin on a Harris Interactive poll:
Only 22 percent of people responding to the poll said they read blogs regularly, meaning several times a month or more, according to the survey conducted by Harris Interactive. [...]Despite the attention blogs can get, the poll said 56 percent of Americans say they never read blogs that discuss politics. Another 23 percent read them several times a year, the survey showed.
While blogs are largely considered the realm of young people who are most Internet-savvy, only 19 percent of people ages 18 to 31, and 17 percent of those ages 32 to 43, regularly read a political blog, the poll said.
So who is reading them?
The generation most likely to read such blogs are those age 63 or older, 26 percent of whom said they do so. Also, 23 percent of those ages 44 to 62 read them, the poll said.
Hey Google, maybe you should automagically place some AARP ads on the site…
Okay, here’s the thing…I actually think the poll reveals that there are A LOT of people reading political blogs. Seriously.
Time for some quick math. The American population is roughly 300 million people. About 73% of that group is over the age of 20, which roughly translates into 219 million people. Now, it’s obvious people younger than 20 read blogs (as the survey shows), but I’m still going to work with that 216M number. So I’ll take 22% of 219M, which gives me approximately 48 million people. If that’s the number of people reading blogs a few times a month, well, that’s a pretty big number, don’t you think?
So instead of a headline that reads, “Poll: Most Americans don’t read political blogs,” it should probably read, “Poll: 48 million Americans read political blogs regularly.”
But hey, somebody check my math on this. I could very well be wrong.
Where’s Patrick Ruffini when you need him?
This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Age, Blogging, Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Would it be fair for headlines to read “48 million Americans approve of President Bush” when his rating is at 22 percent?
March 10th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
He’s here.
I wouldn’t place too much stock in these surveys. Polls that ask people to self-report media consumption tend to vastly overestimate actual activity. People naturally want to appear smarter and/or relevant answers, so if they ever visited a blog once, they are now a hardened blog reader.
I don’t think the actual traffic numbers to the main center-right and center-left blogs can possibly justify a monthly readership of more than 5 million. I’m sure many others read news blogs like AOL’s (which gets an insane number of comments, like 10x Kos) or the AC360 “blog” but are these really participants in the blogosphere in the active sense?
Instead of trying to prove how large the blogosphere is, why not focus on how influential? There we have a case.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
If an American network had 48 million americans watching a television show, that show would be a runaway hit. As a reference: 28.5 million Americans tuned into last Tuesday’s American Idol.
Although, this only represents one program, and not an entire medium.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
I don’t care for the term “most” when used in this fashion. But it’s standard headline practice to use the word most whenever it refers to more than half.
This is done even though “most” people think it means “the overwhelming majority.” Notice in contrast that a media journalist would not say “most people don’t watch TV show X” if 48 million people tuned in regularly. It’s a vague term, and it’s used inconsistently. The unnoticed fact of the matter here is that when speaking of the American public’s behavior, it may be true that “most don’t….” while at the same time it is also just as true that “many do… .”
If journalists took a little bit more time to try to be objective on such matters, they’d seek to contextualize such numbers by comparing them to other known data about leisure-time activities, and especially internet activity. But many journalists are hostile to blogging, so there you go.
In the last few decades, our society has changed so that the mainstream is both narrower and less powerful in its flow. There’s way more choice than there was when we had 3 TV networks and no internet.
22 percent is what it is. Most Americans don’t blog or read blogs frequently, but many do. There really aren’t that many things that “most” Americans do which are worth remarking on… various individual and collective bodily functions(eating, excreting, screwing, drinking, smoking, sleeping) going to work or school, watching TV or movies, gabbing in person or via technology (blogging is part of the gabbing category, BTW), spending money, praying, family get-togethers, looking away from the void… .
I’m sure I missed a bunch, but the point is that the vast majority of the rest of specific activities fall under the 50% participation rate.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:54 am
[...] Gardner looks at the numbers and finds a significant cohort out there: Time for some quick math. The American population is roughly 300 million people. About 73% of that [...]
March 11th, 2008 at 7:17 am
I saw a report on blog readership and community opinion leaders awhile back. Of course, I can’t find it now, but it basically found that opinion leaders in their cohort (friends, family, whatever) were 10 times more likely to blog or read blogs than the average American. This was true whether you’re talking about political opinion leading or fashion opinion leading. The point being: blogs influence a wider group than just their core readers. Those readers then go out and influence others. So while it may be true that MOST Americans don’t read blogs, MANY Americans end up being influenced by them anyways.
Now, doesn’t that make this seem all the more worthwhile?