Rick Bruner has a great post via Jennifer Rice on the growth of blogging. There are somewhere between 2.5 and 8 million blog writers now. How many readers? Who are these readers and what is the emerging potential - read on
Whether it's 2.5 million or 8.8 million, we're still talking about the number of blog writers, not readers. The same Pew study, fielded a year ago, found that 11 percent of respondents read Weblogs with some regularity. Last summer, I conducted a survey for the email services agency Quris, in which we included a question about blog readership, which similarly found 10 percent of the 1,691 respondents regularly read Weblogs (see details of that research in the table "Characteristics of Weblog Readers" below). Bearing in mind that those numbers have doubtless grown in the year since those two surveys, that is still 13 to 14 million Weblog readers. Furthermore, I would venture a lot more people are reading Weblogs without realizing those sites are called Weblogs.
Super-popular blogger Glen Reynolds, of Instapundit.com, leaves his traffic logs open, where we can see that he averages around 100,000 visitors a day and more than 2 million uniques a month. Considering that he's only one guy, that's astounding. By comparison, HoustonChronicle.com reports 1.5 million unique monthly readers. Granted, Instapundit is one of the most widely read bloggers out there, but it puts the phenomenon in perspective.
