Yesterday I went to a briefing on political blogging held by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet and mega-PR agency Edelman Associates. It was pretty interesting. Among the findings: (Read to the bottom – you’ll be glad you did)
- 27% of the US population reads a blog in any given week (@60,193,913 folks – larger than the adult pops of CA, NY, TX combined)34%+ American influentials (people who influence others – logical, right?) read a blog at least once/week
- 28% of American adults that have read a blog have taken action on based on in- formation they received on that blog.
The US age breakdown is kind of interesting too.
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18-24s are largest blog users, as you’d imagine. They report reading a blog an average of 1.6 days/week.
- The next highest isn’t 25-34 (many of whom fell into a kind of "gap" in school computing access and average 0.8 pages/week) but 35-44s who average around 1.05 days/week.
- Then there’s another surprise – the next age cadre, 45-54 is lowest so far at around 0.7 days/week
- Those early Boomers 55-64 are higher, matching the 25-34s at 0.8.
- 65+ averages only around 0.5.
And gender – are we traveling the blogosphere less intensely than the guys? Well the only stats the report had were for political blogs and their researcher says the numbers were pretty much in the margin of error:
- Blog readers who read political blogs: 24% female – 30% male
- Take action from political blog info: 26% female – 30% male]]
A second study, released in October 2006 by IPDI and @dvocacy Inc. showed:
- Daily political blog readers were 75% male and 25% female
- Daily “all others” blog readers were 60% male and 40% female
OK NOW here’s why you read to the bottom: women don’t do their politics exclusively on “political” blogs – not at all! Read Been There or Mom-101 or Lizawashere and see for yourself. As usual, we don’t fit into anyone’s categories – combining family, food, politics and love into the total life we all live. Good for us — we just have to make sure the pundits know this too – so they can find some of our brilliant sisters as they think, write and provoke us to do both better.
Cindy, I think you make a GREAT point! Most of the women bloggers I read include some political content, but wouldn’t classify themselves as “political bloggers.”
I also think that my overtly political posts speak more to my readers because I don’t write them every day, or even every week. I know that my post on Net Neutrality provoked action from some of my “non-political” readers whose eyes had glazed over on hearing the topic in the mainstream media, just for example.
Perhaps what we are seeing is the (current) Internet expression of the demographic fact that women are more likely to become politically active or take on political careers later in life than our male peers?
Just like many women of earlier generations, we have political opinions and ideas, but more of our energy and time are focused on family, food, work, love, or other aspects of daily life.
Additionally, I think women bloggers are more likely to include implicitly political posts that may not even be tagged as such, like the many many posts on breastfeeding, pumping breastmilk at work or while traveling by plane under the horrible new TSA regs, etc.
The age breakdown is also both interesting and unsurprising. I would LOVE to see that broken down into more detail. I suspect the biggest gap age is not 25-34, but closer to 30-40, or maybe just younger than that, like 28-38, for exactly the reasons you described.
It would be interesting to overlay this age graph with one depicting the decline in typewriter sales, as I suspect I am near the end of the age group who got typewriters as high school graduation gifts.
And thanks for the shout out!