In doing a bit of research for a talk I’m giving tomorrow here in D.C. (to the local chapters of IPRA and PRSA-NCC) I’ve been looking for stats on the growth in CGM – Consumer Generated Media. Here’s one I found in yesterday’s Washington Post, reporting on a new study by ComScore Media Metrix. From the Post:
“The number of people posting or reading material at [Blogger.com] jumped to 15.6 million last month from 2.5 million a year ago.”
In other words, traffic to Google-owned Blogger.com increased 528 percent [scroll down for complete Washington Post chart] between Feb. 2005 and Feb. 2006. That counts those reading and writing blogs hosted on the free Blogger.com service.
There’s been a similar explosion in traffic to MySpace.com,the social networking site of choice for young adults. MySpace is now the #10 most visited site on the Web. It attracted 37 million visitors last month, 28 million more than a year ago (a 318 percent increase).
I like this traffic metric, BTW. While we’re bombarded with stats on the growth in number of blogs (over 33 million, according to Technorati), the number of people spending time on blogs – reading or writing them – is really more significant. It’s people’s behaviour online that tells us whether or not blogging and social networking sites are re-making our experience of the Web. Don’t you agree?
Useful Links
Chart of the Top 50 Web Domains (as ranked by ComScore)
Pete Bradshow, chief marketing officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, coined the term CGM. Check out his Consumer Generated Media blog.