Category: Statistics

Almost 2 million Swedes read blogs

Following up on my previous post, I have now read through parts of the World Internet Institute’s new report about how Swedes use the internet.

Some of the more interesting findings are:

– 350,000 Swedes have a blog (estimate), or 6% of the online population.
– 1,900,000 Swedes read blogs (estimate), or 33% of the online population. That means that there are more than five times as many blog readers as there are bloggers. Possibly a good argument against the common view that “nobody reads blogs”.
– Young women between 16 and 25 years are frequent blog readers, see graph below. As many as 52% of all girls 16-18 years that are online, read blogs.

swedenblogreaders

– There is a big difference in which types of communities that attract women and men. Women are more frequent users of social communities while men are more frequent users of hobby and professional communities, see graph below. In my BlogSweden 3 survey the responses indicated that women are more motivated by social interaction than men, which was also a result from a study by Kaye Trammell: “Female bloggers, however, were somewhat more motivated by social interaction (67.1%) than were their male counterparts (51.3%).”

swedencommunities

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Young girls more likely to blog than boys

During the Internetdagarna 08 conference in Stockholm today, the World Internet Institute released their new report on Swedes and their usage of internet. It seems that the survey confirms the findings from my BlogSweden 3 survey earlier this year, that young women are now dominating the Swedish blogosphere. Among 16-18 year-olds it is almost three times as common for girls to blog than it is for boys and in the 26-30 year age group it is even more than three times as common for women to blog.

swedeninternet2008

I will update with more information once I get the entire report.

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How to police 3 billion Flickr photos

How do you police a site consisting of close to 3 billion pieces of consumer genererated media? Ask Heather Champ, Director of Community at photo sharing site Flickr, who oversees that the 30 million members of Flickr follow the community guidelines and don’t post pictures that the company consider illegal or inappropriate.

Champ says there is a clear need to have a control function to monitor the site.

“The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate — I don’t think it could sustain itself in the meantime,” she says. “Anyway, I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own.”

Her team handles feedback from people like for example a woman who complains that her ex-boyfriend has posted inappropriate photos of her or the parent without custodial rights who wants photos of the child, posted by the other parent, removed. Champ says that people sometimes do stupid things due to the anonymity of the web:

“People become disassociated from one another online. The computer somehow nullifies the social contract,” she says.

Read the entire interview by the San Fransicso Chronicle.

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H&M one of the world’s best brands

Interbrand has released its annual ranking of the world’s best global brands 2008. Coca-Cola is still the number one brand with a brand value of 66,667 $m. Finland is leading the Nordic league with Nokia parked in fifth place, but the number of Swedish brands on the list have doubled from one to two. Apparel giant H&M; is one of 8 new brands on the top 100 list and is ranked in 22nd place with a brand value of 13,840 $m. IKEA also climbs from 38 to 35th place. Apart from the new brands on the list, Google is the strongest climber with an increase of 43% in brand value.

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BlogSweden 3 – third annual Swedish blog survey

Between January 1 and 2, 2008, a total of 1,000 Swedish blog readers responded to an online survey about blogs and social media. Of these respondents, 806 are bloggers and it is mainly their answers that are being presented in this report. The report, BlogSweden 3, is a follow up to BlogSweden 1 and 2 from May 2005 and June 2006.

In the survey, three out of four bloggers are women. Here are some more key findings.

Bloggers: The typical Swedish blogger in the survey is:

• Female
• 16-20 years old
• reads 1-5 blogs daily
• spends 1 hour per week reading blogs
• often reads blogs in the evening (6 PM to 12 PM)
• never uses an RSS reader to read blogs
• likes to read blogs about everyday life experiences
• reads blogs to be entertained
• has never clicked on an advertisement on a blog
• is a member of a social network in order to stay in touch with friends
• has during the last 12 months; downloaded video online, listened to radio online or downloaded podcasts, viewed or downloaded video online, have made photos accessible to others online, and has tagged information online.
• has not during the last 12 months; made videos accessible online, saved links via social bookmarking sites or visited virtual worlds.
• blogs because she likes to write
• updates her blog every day
• has nothing against being contacted by companies in her role as a blogger
• is not anonymous
• does not have ads on her blog, from which she gets part of the revenue

In fact, as many as 76.2% of the bloggers in the survey are female.

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There are still some major differences between the way male and female bloggers behave:

• Women more often blog anonymously than men (49.2% compared to 34.0%).
• Male bloggers blog to a higher extent than female bloggers to market a product or a service, to influence others, to strengthen their brand, to create an archive of information and because there is a need for more voices in the public debate.
• Female bloggers blog to a higher extent than male bloggers to get in touch with others and to stay in touch with friends and family.
• 66.5% of all bloggers update their blog every day. Female bloggers update their blogs more often than male bloggers (74.1% at least once a day, compared to 42.6% of male bloggers).
• Male bloggers more often than female bloggers have ads on their blogs (14.3% compared to 7.4%).

When a blogger forms an opinion about a company, she thinks that “a person like me or a peer” is the most trustworthy spokesperson. “A blogger” is as trustworthy as the company CEO, according to bloggers.

One in three bloggers have bought a product after reading about it on a blog. An equally high proportion of bloggers have refrained from buying a product after reading information or opinions on a blog. One in three have, after reading information on a blog, acted in order to influence a company or a politician on an important topic.

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There are also significant differences between how female and male blog readers behave (all respondents in the survey):

Female blog readers prefer reading blogs about:
• Fashion and design (53.0%)
• Everyday life experiences (51.6%)
• Photography and art (26.6%)
• Parenthood and children (24.3%)
• Music (22%)
• Literature and writing (17.2%)
• Movies and tv (16.9%)
• Journalism and media (16.7%)
• Sex and dating (16.5%)
• Politics and society (14.4%)

Male blog readers prefer reading blogs about:
• Politics and society (49.2%)
• IT and blogging (45.8%)
• Journalism and media (45.3%)
• Everyday life experiences (39.4%)
• Advertising and PR (25.8%)
• Movies and tv (25.4%)
• Music (23.7%)
• Photography and art (19.5%)
• Literature and writing (18.6%)
• Economy and entrepreneurship (15.7%)

Over all, the favorite topics of blog readers are blogs about:

• Everyday life experiences (48.6%)
• Fashion and design (44%)
• Photography and art (24.9%)
• Journalism and media (23.8%)
• Politics and society (23%)

Here is a table of the most popular blog categories among bloggers:

10e

The report BlogSweden 3 is free to download under a Creative Commons license and if you would like to discuss the findings you can join Media Culpa on Facebook or find me on Twitter. More graphs can be found at Flickr.

Footnote: The respondents were chosen through a convenience sample which means that the results from this survey is only representative to the respondents of the survey and not necessarily reflect the profile of all Swedish bloggers and blog readers.

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Visits to Facebook fell in Europe – February may be even worse

According to data released yesterday by Nielsen Online, the number of unique visitors in the UK visiting Facebook fell in January. The tremendous growth of the social networking site has come to a halt, and the question is whether this is a temporary hiccup or a sign that the glory days are over.

Nielsen Online says that 8.5 million unique users in Britain spent time on Facebook in January, down from 8.9 million in December. MySpace and Bebo are also seeing declining stats.

Alex Burmaster at Nielsen Online says:
– MySpace peaked in April 2007, with 6.8 million unique users, while Bebo peaked in July with 4.6 million.

The number of unique users also fell slightly in other European countries, but Facebook is still growing in the U.S. However, the numbers for February do not look promising. Not that I trust data from Alexa to be 100% accurate, but a graph of the daily pageviews of Facebook show a dramatic drop during the first days of February, a drop that is in the 20-25% range which is very high. It will be very interesting to study Nielsen’s data for February. [Alexa graph here]

UPDATE: Facebook sees decline in the U.S. as well. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 33.9 million unique visitors in January, 2008, down 2 percent from 34.7 million in December, 2007.

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