Blogging Survey Results: Demographics of Bloggers
In this part of the Global Blogging Survey I asked some personal information about yourself. The aim was to get an idea of the sorts of people who blog, and to see if the “young male geek” stereotype was true.
More Bloggers Are Male Than Female
To be honest I was expecting the male/female balance to be more even. Many of my clients, twitter and blogging contacts are female, and I see more female bloggers now than I ever have. While I did expect males to be higher, I never anticipated it would still be to this degree.
| Gender | Count |
| Male | 560 |
| Female | 303 |
| Rather Not Say | 46 |
Most Bloggers Live in USA
USA still clearly has the lions share of bloggers. What you can’t see in this graph are all the countries with two or three bloggers responding. I do know that blogging is increasingly popular in non English speaking countries, so perhaps my readership skews? One to watch over coming years I think. My prediction is USA will lose the crown before long.
Most Bloggers Have Higher Education
I fully expected bloggers to be an educated bunch and this proves it to be the case, kind of. Obviously this is my readership, which does not necessarily mean all bloggers fall into these groupings. You might be surprised to learn that while my readers are heavily in the “college and university educated” group, I myself never went to university. I left school as soon as I could, at age 15.
How Old is the Typical Blogger?
What would you guess at the average bloggers age? It seems there are as many bloggers over 40 as there are under 30.
Summary
Are bloggers male American teenagers and students? Seems like while a portion could well be, bloggers do not fit tidily into that stereotype and are in fact a pretty diverse bunch.
If you think that many bloggers will attract an audience a lot similar to their own demographic, this information shows there is quite a market for variety of people. It will be interesting to see not just a snapshot but a trend.
Table of contents for Global Blogging Survey Results
- Blogging Survey Results: Years Blogging
- Blogging Survey Results: Demographics of Bloggers
- Blogging Survey Results: Why People Blog
Posted on June 24th, 2008 by Chris Garrett in News
Good to see that nearly one-fifth of bloggers are aged between 41 and 50 (as I’ll be in that group in 2 short years…)
Clear dominance by the USA. No real surprises there. I wonder how it would be going pound-for-pound?
The low female ratio: possible explanation could be that men are more into the numbers game, stats, keeping score etc.,
Anyway, good survey Chris.
I would love to see an expanded view of the blogging countries graph.
Russia and China have the potential, but the language barrier is probably holding many back.
Where is Germany and the Scandinavian countries?
@Martin - I would have expected many more female bloggers, but I guess if you don’t ask you don’t know
@Dennis - Most had one or two entries but here is the full list (hopefully will paste!)
Argentina 1
Australia 59
Austria 2
Barbados 1
Belgium 5
Brazil 6
Brunei Darussalam 1
Bulgaria 2
Canada 51
China 3
Costa Rica 1
czech republic 1
Denmark 5
Dominican Republic 1
Egypt 1
Estonia 1
Finland 5
France 11
Germany 5
Greece 2
Hong Kong 1
Hungary 2
Iceland 1
India 35
Indonesia 7
Ireland 5
Israel 3
Italy 8
Jamaica 1
Japan 2
Lithuania 1
Malaysia 14
Mauritius 1
Mexico 4
Moldova 1
Morocco 1
Myanmar 1
Nepal 2
Netherlands 12
New Zealand 4
Norway 1
Pakistan 2
Panama 1
Paraguay 1
Philippines 17
Poland 3
Portugal 7
Republic of Moldova 1
Romania 5
Russia 2
Saudi Arabia 1
Serbia 2
Singapore 5
South Africa 3
Spain 3
Sri Lanka 1
Sweden 2
taiwan 1
Thailand 2
Turkey 1
UK 89
USA 489
Venezuela 1
Hi Chris,
I have a few figures for Russia. There are about 3.1m blogs over here. That’s 3% of the world’s total bloggers apparently, so your statistics may not be too far out
Most Russian bloggers are women though, holding 60%+ of the market.
http://www.russianmarketer.com/yandex-autumn-report-on-the-russian-blogosphere/2007/11/26/
http://www.russianmarketer.com/women-dominate-the-russian-blogosphere/2008/04/02/
Thanks Nick, that is interesting. Wonder why the gender is flipped there compared to the rest?
Well the Yandex study suggested that Russian men were more into making money (building sites out for sale, advertising or domaining). Until very recently Yandex did not allow contexual advertising on blogs, this maybe why they have not embraced the platform. That’s just a guess though.
Chris,
The blogger survey results are counter to demographics of the overall Internet, which show international users, female users and older users dominate. Possibly why there are more blog readers than creators.
Wow, I am surprised at the gender difference. In the library and information science field, there are a lot of female bloggers, but of course there are a lot of women in general in that field.
I wondered why 46 would rather not state their gender…???
I can understand why the US has the most. I would think because english is the standard business language you would see the areas of english use having the highest number of blogs.
Also could there be any corelation to where most of the hosting is done. I believe a majority of hosting is in the US.
Also are there any statistics on what percentage of people in other countries have personal computers for each family member and internet access in the home?
Interesting Chris. It would be a good idea to show bloggers as a percentage of the population of a country. Would be interesting to know if, though US quantity is higher, there is actually a larger percentage of the British population blogging, for example.
Do you think this survey is representation of your readership or ALL bloggers in the world?
@Steve Smith
We have internet penetration rates for 17 countries in our Global Search Report. The report is due to be updated next month.
http://www.e3internet.com/tools/global-search-report/
HTH
Chris,
I found some of the results surprising, but then again bloggers are a species unto their own.
I would be interested in the results possibly of a followup or another survey that may have things like motivation ie..money(is ft job, pt. job, do advertise, sponsors, affilliates,ect) or public awareness (like the disease cancer, or an nonprofit organization), or just for fun.
Classification (social media, gossip, ect). What services do they use? WHich do they think are most useful? Do they have guest posts? Is the blog run by one or more people?
Very interesting either way. Glad you did this, it was fun.
Vicky H
Chris,
One reader commented that China and Russia have the potential for bloggers, but a language barrier might be a problem. I believe, at least in China’s case, that blogging might be lower due to the government and extremely tight censorship in relation to what is allowed to be posted. When I was visiting Beijing, the BBC was blocked, and so was wikipedia. At the end of my two week stay, the BBC finally came back up. No word on if wikipedia is back up and running, but I think this exemplifies the fact that censorship is possibly a huge deterrent for bloggers in China.
I think Russia has more than a “potential” for bloggers. As I wrote above, they 3.1m blogs online. Not huge compared to the rest of the world but it’s a very fast growing sector.
I’m also not quite sure why people think there is a language barrier to blogging. Russian bloggers are writing in Russian, not English. Although the internet is predominantly in English, there is a significant region in Russian (known as Runet). There are even larger areas in Spanish or Chinese. People blogging within these regions with millions of other users do not see problems with language.
Back to the Russian experience, blogging looks set to grow there. The Russian company “SUP” even bought LiveJournal from Six Apart last year.
Like Matt, I’m wondering if these results (specifically the female to male ration) holds for bloggers in general, beyond your readers and survey respondents. I have a hunch that there are many more women bloggers than this survey shows. And I disagree with Martin’s theory that men are more into the numbers game when it comes to blogging. If the constant conversations about stats at last year’s BlogHer conference are any indication, female bloggers care just as much about stats as anyone. Still, I’d love to figure out what caused the low female result in this survey.
Hi Chris,
That’s kind of surprising. I too, thought the male/female ratio would equal.
I can’t believe you quit school when you were fifteen! That is even more surprising. You strike me as someone that is very educated. But then you know, formal schooling isn’t everything. Ha! Very often it counts for nothing. You are testament to the fact that you can teach yourself anything you want to learn. Thanks. Good teacher.
E
I have to say this is one of my favorite blog posts of the last month. Nice job. Although bloggers are predominately male, our female counterparts are still out there in high numbers. I hope to see this number rise.
Rick
Thanks for sharing Chris.
Perhaps irrelevant but here are some interesting blog readers demographics about sexes.
In 2005, more than 70% of blog readers are male (BlogAds). Pew/Internet said it was 57% men.
It will soon catching up, I think, as in the Internet user demographics.
2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere by Meredith also found that men are more likely to publish. (Look near the end of the post).
I imagine the gender is a bit skewed here and says a bit more about the readership of this blog than about the blogosphere in general. There are tons of “mommy-bloggers” out there who are pretty unlikely to be reading ChrisG.com regularly.
I also think that Censorship might be a bigger barrier then language in China. The government goes to great length to censor them.
On a side not, the government over there don’t care much went businesses rakes in millions of dollar on real money trading
Chris, I found this blog post at “Jorge Camoes’ Charts ” and he was discussing how really good bloggers who preach solid blogging techniques do not know how to properly graph data as well as they can blog. I agree. I am no expert, but I did spend 3 days last with an expert. That expert’s name is Stephen Few and I attended his 3-day workshop in Boston, MA. Here is my advice:
For all of you who want to know the proper way to display data I strongly suggest you read Stephen Few’s book, “Show Me the Numbers”. It is a hard cover book constructed like a college text book. Its list price is 45 in United States Dollars. His website which has a lot of free content that can teach you the basics - http://www.perceptualedge.com
Good luck learning and remember this thought. We can all learn a little something from each other. Because of Jorge’s constructive criticism of your graphing capabilities, I found your blog and after I finish this post I am going to add it to my Goggle Reader.
- @dmgerbino
Interesting survey results. I’m sure the ladies won’t miss the fun and will catch-up in numbers soon!
I’m not terribly surprised by the gender, geographic, and education breakdowns - given the readership who would have participated in the survey, and comparing it to the active membership of the Authority Blogger forum - but the age numbers are astonishing. I suspect that the “greying” of the blogosphere has something to do with the user-friendliness of most blogging platforms and the low cost of entry, but wonder if there’s something more psychological behind it as well. It would be interesting to see how the age data relates to the respondents’ motivations for blogging.
Hi Chris,
Your geographic findings are not quite as skewed as you seem to think. Canada has a population of 30-35 million or just over 10% the population of the US. By your numbers, blogs in Canada are about 10% of those in the US. Similarly, the UK has about 60 million people (I believe — someone correct me if I’m wrong), or about 20% of the US population. Those numbers fit here too.
In fact, if you go by per capita, Australia has more bloggers than the US. Australia’s population is just over 20 million, or about 7% that of the US. Yet it has 59 bloggers — about 12% that of the US.
So on a purely per-capita basis (and based solely on your numbers), Australians tend to blog more than Americans.
~Graham
I didn’t participate in the survey. I come from India. It’s not surprising that most of the bloggers are from USA. I had a vague opinion that most of the bloggers are from Philippines. Since many of the blogs I read are from Philippines and India.