First off, for those of you who like numbers, these out. Second, if you’re reading this, then count yourself part of the abnormal 40% or less of the population (within the US) that has heard of a blog.
You are one of 50 million (of 302,725,681) that has read a blog (or reads blogs on a regular basis). Accodring to comScore networks, 694 million people currently use the internet worldwide.
Considering that we’re 20th in the world in broadband internet penetration and that the 50 million of us who read blogs are 11% more likely to do so from a broadband internet connection, the chance that we make up nearly half of all worldwide internet usage is absurd.
153,887,442 internet users in the U.S. use anti-virus programs to keep their computer from becoming infected malware/viruses while at least 650,000 use AOL (for some reason), and 1/3 of us use broadband.
That’s roughly 100,908,560 people. Taking away the people who have heard of a “blog” (50 million), that leaves 50,908,560 broadband users have not heard of a “blog”.
Considering that Googling the term “blog” returns 1,220,000,000 results (this is world-wide, mind you),
While there are approx 15-30 million blogs in the United States alone, then that would mean at least 20 million of those of us have heard of them simply read without posting to a blog of our own.
20 million people to read 30 million blogs. And with the first unofficial official blogs beginning to take hold in 1998, then that would mean the art itself has nearly a decade to evolve.
And while factors such as numbers and percentages will sometimes point to a decrease in the so-called ‘blogosphere’, the numers themselves will continue to rise as we progress as a society wired to the internet.
But no matter which way you slice it, bloggers will always be in the lower tiers of the internet world.
I’m fine with that.