Political blogs are definitely long tail, survey says
Date : 2008 03 10 Category : Web Webware.comA new survey shows that few Americans really care what bloggers have to say about politics, despite the plethora of opinionated blogs out there this campaign year.
Of 2,300 adults who filled out an online poll in January, 56 percent said they never read blogs on politics and 22 percent said they read them regularly, meaning several times a month or more, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and reported on by Reuters.
Older people are more likely to read the political blogs, with 26 percent of those aged 63 or older reading them and less than 20 percent for people younger than 44.
We wondered what the percentage of readers was for blogs in general. ComScore looked at its online traffic stats and found that 40 percent of all U.S. Internet users visited a blog at least once during February. That represented 74 million unique users.
It would be difficult to converge the two data sets since the methodologies and sample sizes are so different, and ComScore does not break out the numbers based on blog type.
I would have thought that blogs in general had become more mainstream by now, but given that they aren't it's not that surprising that so few people read political blogs.