Categories: Articles

Blogging Is Big Business… There Goes The Neighbourhood

If you think there is a lack of fake Blogs, Spam Blogs and otherwise unsurely types doing everything they can to make some dough off of Blogs, I have some bad news. It’s going to get a lot worse if the people at eMarketer are right about where the Blogosphere is headed.

Yesterday, eMarketer launched a new report titled, The Blogosphere – A Mass Movement from Grass Roots, which retails for $695 (if anyone has a copy and would like to flip me one, I won’t tell ;). Without knowing everything within the pages, eMarketer launched the report with an accompanying news item titled, Blogs Blossom Into A Big Business, with these findings:

– The number of people creating blogs in the US will reach over 35 million by 2012 — roughly 16% of the Internet population.

– By 2012, more than 145 million people — 67% of the US Internet population — will be reading blogs at least once a month.

– Last year (2007) 94 million people, or 50% of Internet users read Blogs at least once a month.

– US blog advertising will reach $746 million in 2012, up from $283 million in 2007.

Why are the numbers looking so promising? This is what eMarketer thinks:

"Like podcasts, blogs tend to appeal to specific audiences. Accordingly, much of the demographic targeting that marketers work so hard to achieve in the mainstream media is already done for them."

As we see the splintering of the mass audience into specific niches, it makes perfect sense that they are attracted to the type of content that is created in Blogs.

Here’s the bigger question: if Blogs do, indeed, get this kind of uptake, can the mass media be supplanted in some kind of world that moves an individual from watching one television channel with anything and everything on it to fifteen Blogs that cater to their specific interests?

Just wondering.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.