March 1, 2004

Pew Report: Media Missed Real Story

Today's media coverage of the latest data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project is fixated on what the survey says about blogging – specifically, that only about 2 percent of American adult Internet users maintain web diaries or web blogs. The stories illustrate the traditional media's fixation with blogs – and how easily that fixation leads the media to ignore the much bigger story in the Pew data: that some 44 percent of online adult Americans have contributed content to the Internet in some form.

Consider this story from the Associated Press today:

Study: Blogging Still Infrequent
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK - Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularly, a new study finds. Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it's clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs. Of those, only about 10 percent update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often.

"The impression out there is that a lot of the blog activity is very feverish," said Lee Rainie, the Pew project's director. "That's not the case. For most bloggers, it's not an all-consuming, all-the-time kind of experience."

The study was largely based on random telephone surveys of 1,555 Internet users taken from March 12 to May 20, 2003. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

That survey found only 2 percent of users keeping blogs, although a preliminary analysis of follow-up surveys from early 2004 showed the figure increasing to about 7 percent.

About 11 percent of Internet users report visiting blogs written by others. Most often, they were for blogs written by friends. But blog readers are more likely to go to journals kept by strangers rather than by family members.

Among other findings: 21 percent of Internet users have posted photos on web sites, and 20 percent say they have allowed others to download video or music files from their computers. Seven percent have webcams that let others see live pictures of them over the Net.

In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation’s adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

- 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to web sites.
- 20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their computers.
- 17% have posted written material on web sites.
- 13% maintain their own web sites.
- 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
- 8% have contributed material to web sites run by their businesses.
- 7% have contributed material to web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
- 7% have web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
- 6% have posted artwork on web sites.
- 5% have contributed audio files to web sites.
- 4% have contributed material to web sites created for their families.
- 3% have contributed video files to web sites.
- 2% maintain web diaries or web blogs, according to respondents to this phone
survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.