Gallup poll on blogs misses the point

A new poll from the Gallup organization has just come out saying that they think blogging, as a trend, is being over-hyped. Here's the full intro from the Gallup site:

The apparent effect that blogging is having within media and political circles is far ahead of its direct impact on the American public. Relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon, and fewer still are reading blogs with any frequency. Even among the most blog-conscious demographic -- 18- to 29-year-olds -- frequent blog reading is the exception.

You need to pay for the whole poll, so don't bother looking for it.

I love to hate Gallup, and most polls, pollsters and statistical reporting orgs in general. Who was it that said, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics?"

Blogs have been around for, what? Four years? Five? They are, from a standpoint of user functionality, no different than a web page. It is from the point of view of the creator/writer/poster/content manager/aggregator that blogs are so truly different. Which is why Kevin O' Keefe, Larry Bodine and I are so up in the grill of the legal profession to get into blogs. The law is a content rich, speaker-platform-happy industry. And blogs are built for that kind of arena.

I'd also like to note that according to the Nielsen ratings, daily newspaper readership has declined from a high in 1964 of 80.8% of adults to today's current low of 52.8%. It's also interesting to note that 67.4% of all daily newspaper readers today are over 55.  So, with paper news  on the decline, where are people turning for info? Right. To the web. And as Kevin pointed out in a recent listserv post, most people don't even realize it when they're getting info from a blog; to them, it looks like a web site. The distinction between "site" and "blog" is lost on the average surfer because, well... there's not much of a distinction.

In the top 50  markets that Nielsen measures, there are 148 million adults. If 3% of those people are reading blogs on a daily basis (which is what the Gallup poll says), that's about 4.4 million people a day. If 15% read them a few times a month (again, from Gallup), that's about 22 million people/month actively involved in a medium that is younger than the TV show "Survivor."

It used to be that getting a fair chunk of 4.4 million people a day or 22 million people a month would cost you a couple million bucks; I know -- I've done it. The entrance fee for that level of marketing has six zeroes.  Today, you can put up a really nice blog for... about... oh, yeah. Free. Or spend $15 - $100 a month to do a super-fantastic job. It takes time to put together good content, but that's always going to be the case.

The fact that ONLY 4.4 million people a day, and ONLY 22 million people a month are getting news and information from blogs --  a nascent medium effectively run by individuals with (generally) no media training,  no editorial support staff,  no marketing budget and no corporate sponsorships -- is startling. But not because it's a low number.

Gallup can jump on the bandwagon of everybody else that doesn't get it. Blogs aren't about one small group of people talking AT everyone else, they are about many, many groups of people talking WITH each other.  By that standard, they have already eclipsed many other  communications media in terms of effectiveness and breadth of impact.

Comments

[JMoore]

It would be impossible to put together a study, but I am willing to bet that at least 20 percent of news reported in MSM is first reported by blogs. Not that the MSM wouldn't have reported the stories eventually, but they are increasingly getting their cues from blogs.