Bloggers ARE Different...

As a new blogger I'm intrigued by the type of people that write and read blogs.  This post discusses how different bloggers may be from the rest of mainstream society and what it means for advertising services companies that target the blog audience.

Below is a list from the New York Times on the Most Emailed stories and another list on the Most Blogged stories from January 8, 2007.  The differences in the implied interests of those that read and write blogs versus mainstream society are startlingly apparent.

January 8, 2007 NYT Most Emailed List
1. Happiness 101
2. Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat
3. Little Asia on the Hill
4. Editorial: The Imperial Presidency 2.0
5. When Buying a Diamond Starts With a Mouse
6. Big Sur Without the Crowds
7. Jazz Is Alive and Well. In the Classroom, Anyway.
8. Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying
9. In Obesity Fight, Many Fear a Note From School
10.   Frank Rich: The Timely Death of Gerald Ford

January 8, 2007 NYT Most Blogged List
1. In Days Before Hanging, a Push for Revenge and a Push Back From the U.S.
2. Plan Sets Series of Goals for Iraq Leaders
3. Bush Plan for Iraq Requests More Troops and More Jobs
4. Mr. Ford Gets the Last Laugh
5. The Imperial Presidency 2.0
6. Images of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to Many
7. A New Commander, in Step With the White House on Iraq
8. The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat
9. War Could Last Years, Commander Says
10. Attack of the Zombie Computers Is a Growing Threat, Experts Say

The Most Emailed list seems pretty representative of the interests of the general population: emotional happiness, marriage, buying diamond rings, music, childhood obesity and travel.  The Most Blogged list shows the top 9 entries are political, and #10 is about computer / privacy security.  You couldn’t come up with a better snapshot on how the interests of bloggers are different from those of the general population.

It may not always be this different, but I had also grabbed the same list on October 11, 2006.

Most E-Mailed List
1. Essay: Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing
2. Seduced by Snacks? No, Not You
3. An Elephant Crackup?
4. Gone for Decades, Jaguars Steal Back to the Southwest
5. Eye-Catching Images of Nature, Made With a Common Machine
6. Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to Center
7. Music Review | Barbra Streisand: Music Overpowers Streisand's Many Missteps
8. In God’s Name: Religious Programs Expand, So Do Tax Breaks
9. In God’s Name: Religion-Based Tax Breaks: Housing to Paychecks to Books
10. Cat Lovers Lining Up for No-Sneeze Kitties

Most Blogged List
1. Evangelicals Blame Foley, Not the G.O.P.
2. N. Korea Reports 1st Nuclear Arms Test
3. At Reuters, a New Book and a Lost Job
4. Poll Shows Foley Case Is Alienating Public From Congress
5. Foley Scandal Is Hurting G.O.P.'s Image, Poll Finds
6. N. Korea Reports 1st Nuclear Arms Test
7. Baker, Presidential Confidant, Hints at Need for New War Plan
8. Blast May Be Only a Partial Success, Experts Say
9. Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube
10. Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights

Whole lotta social sciences conversations could be had around this topic, but I’ll leave that to others.  Please comment freely here or at your own blogs and/or link back.  My conversation thread is on what it means to online advertising services.  The heaviest blogging activity comes from a very tight psychographic segment.  It’s a valid question to ask whether the READERS of blogs (as opposed to the authors whose activity comprised the above list) are as tightly defined psychographically.  My guess is that the readers are not as tightly defined, but pretty close…because if all you have to read in blogs is political news then it will be political news interested people who read blogs.  Others will just not bother and read the emails about love, marriage, health, travel, etc. that their friends and families send around.  Advertisers wishing to reach this psychographic segment have a gold mine.  Other advertisers might not get the performance from their ads that they hope for.

As a shareholder in Feedburner, creator of the largest RSS-based ad network, this is a topic that I’m keenly interested in as it affects my bank account.  Feedburner does manage feeds from all sorts of media sources, not just bloggers, but the most fertile ground for their ad network is feeds from bloggers. Dick, Brent, Fred, Brad, Matt(s) and others: please chime in here to add your thoughts on this.

I'm also a shareholder in comScore Networks, who has made a great business out of addressing topics such as this.  Gian F., do you have anything you want to add here?

Although I'm not a shareholder in FM, I am also very curious as to John Battelle's thoughts on the topic, as he has been around online media audiences longer than anyone and his current company is based on advertising to the blogger audience.  John, any comments you want to share?

A key question is IF and if so, then WHEN will the blogger audience be more representative of the overall population?  Until it does, advertising on blogs is going to be a goldmine for campaigns that appeal to the existing tightly defined blogger psychographic.  After it becomes mainstream it should become a goldmine for all advertisers.

Matt B: do you have thoughts on this relative to the development of the email marketing market that you’ve seen while running Return Path?  Email had the same problem 5 years ago.  Now it seems as mainstream as broadcast TV.

On a related note, I have a challenge for some MBA student or marketing research PhD student to do a research project on the topic: It would be interesting to use the Most Blogged and Most Emailed lists from the NYT to create an “index” of sorts.  The index would track over time the mainstream-ization of the blogger audience.  Articles would have to be classified by category (which the NYT does) and then aggregated to show trend lines.  I’d have to think about this a bit more, but some statistics-oriented student could design this in their sleep:

- Take the Most Emailed list for some period of time, say one quarter history

- Assign each of the articles to a category.  If the NYT doesn’t cooperate, you could probably build a site crawler that looked for the title of each article on the NYT site and determine what category it was assigned to on the site (e.g. Travel, Health, Sports, etc.).  Or you could crawl all the words in the articles and make a contextual assumption.

- Use the volume of articles assigned to each category (e.g. 10% Health, 20%, Business, 10% Politics, etc.) in the Most Emailed as the baseline index for the online media “conversational” interests of the general population, or at least the population of the NYT audience.  I say “conversational” because emailing an article to someone is akin to talking to them about it.

- Do the same categorization assignment to the Most Blogged articles going forward to get a proxy for the online media conversational interests of the blogger population, and then show the comparison against the baseline and how it is trending over time.

Probably other ways to do this…would love to hear other people’s thoughts, and would especially like to hear of someone taking this on as a project.  You’d have a lot of interested people following the results.

Comments

[fred]

bloggers aren't all political junkies. but clearly the ones who link to the NY Times are.

i wonder what these two lists would look like if you were using the Chicago Tribune instead of the NY Times.

[Matt M]

RSS continues to grow rapidly, but we are still in the first couple of innings regarding user adoption & awareness. Feed readers are either new clients (like Newsgator) or web-based but complex to add feeds (MyYahoo). It has been baked into IE7 and Safari, but it should go mainstream when it is part of Outlook and Mac Mail (next release) where it looks like email folders and is subscribed and consumed easily. Until then, adoption will continue to be aggressive but skewed...

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