Audience family income

BlogAds' second annual survey of blog readers showed the blog audience getting a bit older, a little richer a tad more female. Most interestingly, the survey showed that the blog audience contains a very disproportionate number of influentials, that minority that drives the opinions of the majority. The audience is almost twice as likely to subscribe to Adbusters than to AdAge, but it isn't as monomaniacally liberal as some people would paint it. Only 39 percent marked themselves as Democrats, while 27 percent said they were Republicans. When asked which media they find most useful for news and opinion, blogs were rated number one, and television was the medium most commonly marked as "worthless."

Two distinctive humps showed in the graph of how many blogs the audience reads. One group read between one and six blogs each day, while another group appeared to read from between 10 and 50, which may indicate the split between those people who read blogs on the web as opposed to those who quickly skim headlines through RSS readers. Only 12 percent of the blog reading audience said it used RSS always or often.

The recent fad of podcasting appears to be much overblown, with this very early adopter audience indicating almost no one actually listens to the audio readings of commentary. Three percent said they listened to one podcast per week. Two percent said they listened to a couple. The people indicating they listened to more than that were too few to make a blip on the graph.

A plurality of the web audience spent said it spent 10 hours per week reading blogs, and the most commonly cited reason was "news I can't find elsewhere."