Blogging in America

I recently ran across some interesting statistics from BIGresearch with demographics information for our country’s bloggers.

The average age of a U.S. blogger is 37.6, which is 7.2 years younger than the average age of a U.S. citizen. Bloggers report $1k less in annual revenue than America’s average citizen. But they’re younger, so that’s to be expected. Bloggers are also better educated with 14.3 years of education compared with 14.2 years for the average American (it’s close, but I suppose 1/10th of a percentage is still important).

26% of all U.S. adults say they regularly or occasionally blog. A majority of the bloggers are men (54%) and almost half are married (45%).

The majority of bloggers are White (70%) with Hispanics taking the second position (20%) followed by Blacks and Asians with 12% and 8% respectively. Interestingly, a higher percentage of African-Americans and Asians blog than are represented in the general population.

Another finding, which is no surprise, is that bloggers use new media significantly more than the average American. They lead substantially in categories for cell/mobile phones, instant messaging, downloading TV/video content, video gaming and text messaging.

However, bloggers report that traditional media is what triggers Internet searches: magazines (52%), reading an article (49%), broadcast TV (46%), cable TV (45%), face-to-face communication (43%), and the newspaper (40%).

So, like I tell clients: there’s not a magic bullet. It’s a mix of media that best serves to promote and inform.