Bloggers versus Print Media Websites: Comparative UK Market Shares
- Bloggers versus Print Media Websites: Comparative UK Market Shares
Robin Goad of Hitwise published some figures for the market share of blogs and newspaper websites that have not been remarked upon.
I think that a comparison between blogs and the websites of Print media is of interest, as both are basically written forms of communication - albeit with an increasing use of multimedia.
The growth of blogs over 3 years is startling, and together this data shows the increasing use of the internet as a news source more recently.
Blogs: Almost quadrupled share in 3 years
This first graph shows the increasing market share of “blogs and personal websites”, which has increased from roughly 0.33% to 1.19% over the last three years.
Should be fun.
News and Media - Print: 1.0% to 1.95% in 3 years
This second graph shows the share of print up until early 2008.
When I mentioned this comparison to Robin, he kindly checked the latest figures, which came out as follows:
Week ending 14th June 2008:
-
Blogs and Personal Website market share: 1.20%.
-
News and Media - Print Websites: 1.95%.
Notes
As with most figures published by Hitwise, these are market share figures for visits, and are gathered by tapping into the traffic flowing through the infrastructure owned by Internet Service Providers. It is not necessarily appropriate to compare them with other figures unless you know that the data collection methods are comparable.
Comments
I think that a comparison between blogs and the websites of Print media is of interest, as both are basically written forms of communication - albeit with an increasing use of multimedia.
The growth of blogs over 3 years is startling, and together this data shows the increasing use of the internet as a news source more recently.
The newspaper websites seem to have got something right in the last 6 months since the start of 2008, gaining as much market share as in the previous 3 years. I put this down to three reasons:
- The laggards among the nationals have started getting results from their push onto the web.
- The regional press is showing increasing innovation in their use of the web.
- Media websites are making increasingly effective use of “social bookmarking” websites such as Digg.
A large number of independent blogs are not covered by the figures, which focus heavily on hosted blog services, such as wordpress.com.
I’m putting together a list of some larger independent blogs for Robin to feed into the Hitwise database, so that gap may close - at least a little.
References
You can read more detail about the data, and follow some good conversation, at these posts on the Hitwise blog:
- 29/1/2008 UK Internet Traffic to Newspaper Websites
- 10/6/2008 Blog Traffic Reaches all Time High
Tags: hitwise, newspaper websites, robin goad
Categories: All WW, Internet / Technical, Media, Number Crunching, Online Media
I’m going to have to give this a fairly large ‘hmmm’.
The main thing is that you are not comparing like with like. A hit on a blog can be a quick scan of the top article while buying a single newspaper can mean a couple of hours reading every piece.
There is also the question of weight; an article in a newspaper counts for more than an article on a blog, even if viewed by exactly the same number of people, as the newspaper has the gravitas that blogs, as yet, lack. Part of this, of course, is the reinforcement of the position of the newspapers by other media outlets. Blogs refer to newspapers far more than newspapers refer to blogs and, of course, ‘tomorrow’s front pages’ is still a feature on Newsnight and most of the twenty-four hour news channels.
xD.
Dave Coles last blog post..RIP, World’s Oldest Blogger
I’d accept your “fairly large hmmm”. I’d apply an even larger “Hmmm” to all statistics - but this is about as good as the stats comparing blogs to newspaper websites get without spending money.
>The main thing is that you are not comparing like with like. A hit on a blog can be a quick scan of the top article while buying a single newspaper can mean a couple of hours reading every piece.
The figures are for Print Media Websites, not the newspapers themselves (hence “Print Media Websites” in the title
). I wouldn’t do a website versus printed copy comparison (Oi ! 
); I’d - rightly - get shredded after the treatment I gave Joy lo Dico 2 weeks ago. I’ve changed the table to read “News and Media - Print Websites: 1.95%.” since that may have contributed to any misunderstanding.
A hit on a newspaper website can also be a quick scan, just as much for a blog. A couple of points on how readers come to sites.
On “single page visits” - measured by ‘bounce rate” - again I have not seen newspapers release figures, but given the extent to which they are all doing linkbait and celebrity bumf targetted at search engines (and Google image search in particular), I think you might be surprised. Guardian perhaps excepted - Guardian linkbait = Polly and Comment is Free.
I’d take the point that the sheer bulk of newspaper websites may mean that people stay longer. On the other hand, presentation of e.g., series of articles which mitigates the other way can be more coherent on blogs.
If I do think about readers to websites in comparison with readers of printed media, I always think of the concept that web readers includes the “equivalent” of the people who read the first page of a paper in WHSmith.
I hope that clarifies.
[Update. You said:
>Blogs refer to newspapers far more than newspapers refer to blogs
Agree there. This is down to newspapers failing to acknowledge source, and it is disgraceful. For example, the photo used by Gordon Brown to persuade the G8 to be a bit more proactive in Zimbabwe came from the Sokwanele blog and I have seen no acknowledgements anywhere even when the photo was referenced in articles. Paul Canning has more.]