TheWayoftheWeb

I’ve just spotted some research by Emarketer on US blog readership which shows that, despite the justified excitement and uptake of Twitter et al, blog readership is set to grow from 94.1 million readers in 2007 to 145.3 million in 2012. That figure is people reading a blog at least once a month.

Whether or not that’s totally correct, what’s interesting for me is that the 94.1million in 2007 is 50% of U.S. internet users. So 50% of internet users in 2007 didn’t read a blog once a month in that year. Is this because they didn’t know about them? Didn’t care about them? Didn’t trust them? Need them?
Definitely shows there’s still room for growth in the blog world, with blog advertising predicted to more than double by 2012.

Get more details, and the option to obtain the full report from eMarketer.

I’ve said before that I try and stay away from blogging too much about my day job, as I want my opinions to be clearly independent from Emap/MCN, and I also don’t want to post anything that seems like advertising.

But sometimes I can’t avoid it, particularly when I came in to work today to find MCN’s site on the front page of The Register.

It’s the inherent danger of serving ads via keywords, and it’s hard to avoid. All you can really do is react as soon as it happens.

I’ve said before that I try and stay away from blogging too much about my day job, as I want my opinions to be clearly independent from Emap/MCN, and I also don’t want to post anything that seems like advertising.

But sometimes I can’t avoid it, particularly when i came in to work today to find MCN’s site on the front page of The Register.

It’s the inherent danger of serving ads via keywords, and it’s hard to avoid. All you can really do is react as soon as it happens.

I’m still pondering the eternal paradox which is RSS.

On one hand know that the majority of people who will read this will do it via an RSS feed, whether it’s read in Live Bookmarks in Firefox, a feed reader, or another outlet.

By the same token, I don’t have the size, stature or chance to place adverts in my RSS feed yet, so anyone reading this via RSS can’t be tempted by any links.

So do I start publishing a truncated RSS, against my better judgement, to get people to come and view my blog to try and eke out a few extra dollars, or do I continue in the hope that enough people will still be intrigued enough to visit?

It’s a micro version of the problem facing most online publishers in one form or another. Whether or not I can solve it satisfactorily, remains to be seen…

On another note, I’m at internetworld tomorrow at Earl’s Court in London. See if you can spot the Badger!