[Air-l] Weblogging statistics I would be curious to know

[David Brake]

1) Has anyone tried to find out systematically the numbers of readers  
for weblogs across the whole popularity spectrum? Ie how many readers  
does the typical personal weblogger have? How many readers do the top  
bloggers get?

The only guesstimate I have seen is from this:
Pollard, D. (2005) The Long Tail: A-Listers Maybe Not So Powerful  
after All How to Save the World  Last accessed: 22 Mar 2005   Last  
updated: 4 Mar 2005  Address:  http://blogs.salon.com/ 
0002007/2005/03/04.html.
It estimates number of page views, in-links and "reader attention/ 
day" for five popularity categories of blog but the methodology is a  
little wobbly.

2) What is the typical ratio of commenters to readers across  
different blog genres? (Since I imagine this varies wildly depending  
on the type of blog) Would be useful for guessing traffic for people  
who don't measure their traffic.

3) Any idea how much money leading and mid-ranked bloggers and/or  
podcasters get from their advertising?

4) Any idea what proportion of weblog readers read the personal blogs  
of people they know without those people knowing they are reading them?

I have lots of other statistical questions about blogging but that's  
a good off-the-top-of-the-head shortlist... If anyone is working  
towards answers to any of these questions even if you haven't got the  
answers yet, please do let me know.

And a Happy New Year to all and sundry!

---
David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London  
School of Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ 
mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/  
(personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ 
dealingwithemail/>
callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone)