Feb 27 2008
How many Aussie Bloggers are there (revisited)?
Does this answering the perennial question? Not sure, but check out these links.
From a Nielsen study of 4,000 Australian and New Zealand internet users, Laurel Papworth presents Australians DO blog and Anthony follows up by quantifying it – 2.3 million Australians have created a blog.
Related
Australian IT article
Nielsen Consumer Generated Media Report (PDF)
What do you think? Is a sample of 4,000 internet users representative enough of the internet population? Does 2.3 million sound like a lot?
Well, not sure if Aussie Bloggers can handle 2 million members on the current server but we’d be happy to upgrade 😉 .
8 Responses to “How many Aussie Bloggers are there (revisited)?”
It’s not so much the size of the sample that matters with research more the sampling techniques. I always sign up for surveys and market research as a bit of a trend spotting thing and I now remember I may have participated in this survey late in 2007 via pureprofile (a online service where you receive monetary credit for participating in surveys). If it was a pureprofile survey that generated this data it is pretty much useless as it is such a poor sample frame as the respondents are self selected and not random. From an analysis perspective it means it is a non probability technique which can not be used to infer from the sample to the general population. I’ve emailed Nielsen just now to query the sampling methodology. I should have thought of this when I blogged it but until you question the sample I didn’t even think. Either I trust the media and companies way too much or I have repressed by research studies. Though my reference to hoping universities start research into new media was half hoping for a better study because I know they use much more robust methods than commercial researchers.
Anthony’s last blog post..2.3 million Australians have created a blog
Most people I know off-line aren’t even aware what a BLOG is. Either I live in a backwater (oh, that’s right, I do…..) or it seems unlikely to me that there would be as much as 10% of the population blogging.
I’m not all that great with statistics at the best of times let alone this time of night so maybe I’ll come back and read the referred to articles in the morning.
It would certainly be interesting to know how many Australian Bloggers there ARE though.
Lightening’s last blog post..Smiley Saturday Swap Reminder
Hello from Leiria – Portugal.
My first intent to join this bloggers´s group is trainning English language. But i like very much photographe and write generalities about myself and my city.
Regards
Toni
antonio’s last blog post..Sentir de pai
Ten percent sounds high to me too. However, it is not just he number of folks who have blogs, but the number who actually update them regularly (the stats don’t seem to indicate this — or maybe I need to buy the whole report 😉 ).
Having said that, if we include MySpace pages as “blogs” then, I am guessing that 10% is close to the mark. Depends how “blogs” were defined.
Gavin Heaton’s last blog post..Cluetrain @ 10: The Video
If I recall correctly from my stats subjects in uni all those years ago, depending on the sampling method used, between 2,000 and 4,000 is considered a statistically valid sample base for just about any population size.
However, I do think the number is a bit high but I would need to look in greater detail at sampling methods, standard deviations, outliers etc etc (and would also have to drag my brain kicking and screaming to look at statistics in this way – I promised it “never again” a few years ago).
As noted in the comments above, any sample base that is self-selected is automatically suspect.
If it’s true, it’s bad news for Ken Parish and the Missing Link editors.
Jacques Chester’s last blog post..Relative economic performance of New Zealand and Australia
[…] Via Blogpond comes word of a Nielsen survey (PDF) claiming that 2.3 million Australians have blogs. This is probably bad news for the Missing Link crew, except that there’s no figures on what percentage are MySpace pages and still active. […]
It does seem awfully high. Most people and businesses I know don’t have a blog at all.
Cheers
Rosie Murphy
Virtually Yours