The Qumana Survey delved into the topic of advertising in quite some depth. Given the amount, and depth, of information, we'll likely get about 3 good posts out of it, all with some great insight into people's perspectives on advertising and their participation therein.

This first post will look at the presence and use of advertising by bloggers.

(n=89)

Out of a 89 respondents, only 33 people participate in advertising programs of any sort, and of those, only 7 knowingly insert advertisements into their feeds.

Analyzing the data further, those most likely to be participants in advertising programs were more likely to write on 3 or more blogs and to be more active in the blogosphere for greater than 6 months - this isupports the premise that experienced bloggers are more likely to want to earn revenue, at least in part, for their efforts.

(n=33)

By far, participants indicated use of the AdSense program most often to earn revenue from their blogs. There are a number of bloggers, though, who use multiple programs. There is a small proportion of bloggers using two or more advertising programs to maximize their earning potential.

It is clear that AdSense currently offers the most comprehensive advertising program to bloggers. However, as we see from our follow up question, most bloggers are only taking advantage of blog-centric advertising, those ads that appear on the site only. This does limit some earning potential that could be had from RSS-enabled ads, but it could also spell, for some, frustration with RSS-advertisements: either a dislike for RSS ads in general (which we cover later) or for the performance of said advertisements. For example, I have tried the AdSense for Feeds program with very little success, and therefore disabled it.

Whether these programs are successfully generating revenue for bloggers is not a topic of this post- but rather one to be examined in a later post (since we did ask some questions in this area).

Bloggers not participating in Advertising programs

When you examine the flip side of those who choose not to participate in advertising, you see a drastic reduction in number of blogs supported - the vast majority of those indicating this preference had 1 to 2 blogs, although some have 3 to 5. Where we see the greatest variance is in length of time blogging - here, we see a fairly even distribution of bloggers of all experience levels. This tells me that participating in advertising programs is an informed choice.

(n=50)

There are some bloggers, around 20 in our survey, who choose not to participate in blog advertising due to a dislike of advertising. Others not participating in advertising programs had other reasons, the strongest being the belief that their blogs will not make money. These bloggers have either no faith in the advertising programs, or feel their blogs are too small to make money.

I think it's a combination of the two. For example, one serious barrier to trial is the high payout minimum for programs such as Google AdSense. This large figure, usually over $100, prohibits bloggers from testing the waters, so to speak, because any revenue they do accrue will not be paid to them, and this could frustrate bloggers from spending the time to tweak their ads for greater earnings.

34% of bloggers who don't participate in advertising do intend to sign up for an advertising program of some sort, and a high proportion of those have requested assistance - this strongly affirms that a proportion of bloggers just don't know how to place advertising on their blogs. This relates, in part, to the difficulty in setting up blog-centric advertising programs like AdSense, which require you to know how to edit your template to insert the proper code to generate the ads.

This knowledge of editing templates and such is far beyond that which we will see later from experienced bloggers - in future, experienced bloggers will not necessarily be those geeks who know about blogging, but those people who are good at writing and interacting with people. Web 2.0 is characterized by tools that are intended to make publishing simple - such simplifications will take power away from those geeks who once ruled the Internet domain.

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Our next posts will follow with the earnings rate in blogs and finally with the opinon of advertising in blogs, which can be quite a hot topic.

Related posts:

Blogging Survey - On Bloggers
Blogging Survey - The Use of RSS

Technorati Tags: qumana, blogging, survey, advertising, blogads, adsense, RSS advertising, problogging, blog-centric ads

The hot news in the blog platform world, okay besides Blogware getting slaughtered with comment spam last week, is TypePad 2.0 or Comet.  Maybe Comet is going to be an option for TypePad users.  I hope so.  Anyway, following the famous "Mom test" as in "so easy my mom can use it" ... Mena Trott Demo-ed Comet with her mom.  That's cool.  From the sounds of it, Comet is going to aiming for increasing the connectivity between groups, drawing lines between public and private.

I think Comet is a great evolution in blogging, and I look forward to making sure Qumana will be able to work seamlessly with it.  From what I've seen and read I think Comet will truly bring the family website into reality.  How many times have we tried this before?  I think this might be the ticket.  Being able to have the family photos, notes, stories, news, in one place, but also having the public side too.  Yes, that's great.  The proof will be the ease of use and, speed.  Let's not forget speed.  Mom and dad aren't going to have kick butt machines.

The Blogosphere needs, and dare I say loves, this kind of innovation.  Yes, some folks might decry the lack of "purity", but this is a great evolution of the medium.  Pulling all kinds of multi-media and Web 2.0 features together.

From Mena's blog this is how she describes the evolution and goal of Comet:

We went through all her concerns and showed how “Comet” addresses them. First, she does have things to say — she emails me and calls me constantly. If she was just to write about the family, she’d have more than enough content. But if she was to write about the family, she’d feel uncomfortable about anyone being able to read it. Therefore, we’ve provided privacy options that let only certain groups read your content. Not only that, but we provide views from the groups she has set up in dynamically driven pages that can be organized by keywords and topics. And finally, we’ve built in aggregation in both the application and the “published” pages.

 

We’ve taken the stuff we’ve learned from the community features of LiveJournal and mixed them with the publishing features of Movable Type and TypePad. And we’ve made it extremely media-rich. Adding photos, audio, books and music reviews, etc... is as easy as dragging and dropping files into your posting screen.

See?  Evolution, innovation.  This is cool.

I did a quick search and this is a selection of commentary and sources on Comet ... catch it.

• Six Apart - Project Comet
• TechCrunch » Web 2.0 This Week (September 18-24)
• Niall Kennedy's Weblog- More TypePad 2.0 details

• PubSub to Measure Blog Influence by Category
• Blog Buzz News- PubSub Improvements Coming ...
• PubSub to Measure, Categorize Blog and Site Influence

I love new features from FeedBurner, especially free ones!  Last week they announced PingShot a new pinging service—Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog- PingShot.  Pinging, of course, is when your blog server software let's the rest of the world know "Hey!  There's something new here ... come on down!"  Typically this is done automatically, and by default, by the major services.  Also when you DIY it, also is easy to turn on.  Now, why is this different?  This ping service is tied to your FeedBurner-burned feed.  Meaning that instead of your server giving the world your other feed address ... it all focuses on FeedBurner.  This lets you gather better stats from them.  I think this might be why, come to think of it, that both the Qumana blog and View from the Isle's FeedBurner circulation freaking exploded on Friday.  So here are the key features of PingShot:

• Podcast-Sensitive (as in, it by default pings the podcast directories)
• Open Registry (as in, all engines are welcome)
• Spam! (as in, this can't become a tool for the Dark Side)
• Determining Default Services (you choose who you ping).

Now for a beginning blogger and the beginning pro blogger you can't underestimate the importance of a good pinging service.  Pinging is one of the ways your blog will get found.  As a pro blogger this is incredibly key.  Remember, as a pro part of your job is also to increase traffic to the blog.  If you don't ping ... they won't come.

Arieanna continues with Part 2 of the results of our blogging survey focused on RSS and RSS readers.  In another post I'm going to talk about the relationship between time blogging and feeds read, but this one is on RSS readers.  I've lost count of the number that I've tried and keep trying.  Yes, Lektora is my favourite (it is a real Victor Kiam story), but I know that it isn't perfect.  So I keep trying other readers to see what other's are doing and get inspired.  You can see from the chart at on the right that while Bloglines is the largest single player (and I, frankly, use it myself to search feeds.), there is a huge amount of fragmentation out there  I think people are still trying to figure out how best to present feed information.  We have web-based browser-based, we have browser-based, but offline.  Outlook integrated.  Standalone.  Wow.  What is the best way?  Personally I like browser-integrated, but offline.  I also like being able to skim fast through feeds.

This tells me that there is room for a breakthrough.  A new metaphor for reading news.  A new way to integrate the data you receive with your routine, your thinking, and your work.  Do I have the answer?  Nope.  I'm still looking.  I think I've tried most on the RSS readers on that chart in the past month ... all for like the second or third time.  Just to look at improvements, to understand.  Any one have suggestions?  What makes a great news reader for you?

Technorati Tags : RSS+aggregators, Lektora, Qumana

We will continue our analysis of our blog survey results by looking into the use of RSS, and the preference for aggregators. I particularly like this section for what it says of blogger behaviour, and what it speaks to about the fractured RSS aggregator market - a surprise to me, as it may be to others.

(n=95)

71% of our users read 100 or less blogs. On the high end, we have 19% reading more than 150 blogs - I would be in this high end, given that my RSS reader fluctuates at around 350.

I was surprised to find that 19% of our users read less than 10 blogs, while 15% read less than 30. To me, the act of reading blogs is a necessary step in writing them effectively, so I expected these figures to be higher.

To understand how blog readership was correlated with the act of blogging, I cross referenced these figures with blogging experience (how long they've been blogging) and with number of blogs.

According to the survey, 49% of users who have been blogging for at least one year have at least 100 blogs in their RSS reader. This, of course, makes sense - time increases likelihood of number of blogs read, as well as written on, which we previously noted. 61% of bloggers who write on at least 3 blogs read more than 100 blogs - noting the importance of reading blogs in writing on them.

(n=95)

The use of aggregators was a little bit more variant than any other question in the survey. Although we have a strong indication of the market presence of Bloglines, FeedDemon and NewsGator, we have a very high proportion of users favoring other RSS readers. There are 16 RSS readers used only by one person, with half a dozen more used by only 2 or 3. This says to me that, despite the dominance of a few key players, people are not completely satisfied and are searching for something more specific to their needs.

Our own Lektora was in the top 5, which is satisfying, but shows a great need for growth in the market, and says something about our own attention to this product in our offering - our marketing and our blog posts need to speak more to this market.

37% of Bloglines users have at least 100 feeds populating their aggregator, while the next largest player, FeedDemon, has only 18% of users reading more than 100 feeds. Looking at the figures for all of the players, the number of feeds read does not correlate overly strongly with chosen reader, but perhaps certain readers offer more organizational abilities for larger numbers of feeds than others.

When you look at time blogging versus aggregator, you get a stronger preference for Bloglines. For those blogging 1-2 years, 28% use Bloglines; for those blogging more than 2 years, 61% use Bloglines. These are very interesting correlations.

Well, I think I could play all day mixing up these figures and figuring out some interesting things, but I think I've put forth those that speak most clearly to certain trends in blogging and the RSS market.

Related posts:
Blogging Survey - On Bloggers

Technorati Tags: qumana, survey, blogging, blogosphere, aggregator, RSS, bloggers, blogging survey

This is the first post in a series about the nature of the Blogosphere, based on data from our recent survey of Qumana users. Our survey is based upon the data and opinions of 103 bloggers who have tried or have downloaded Qumana . This survey gave us a lot of insight into bloggers and the Blogosphere, as well as great feedback to help us improve Qumana. The first part of the survey series will look at the blog experience of our users.

Activity of bloggers - how long they've been blogging, for how many blogs, and for how much time per week.

(n=103)

Roughly 50% of bloggers using Qumana have been blogging for at least a year. Given that I'm not even at that mark myself, it's an impressive figure. The data suggests two things: that Qumana is being used by "experienced" bloggers, and that offline editors are tools sought out after a year of blogging. Possibilities for this shift could stem from frustration with posting via browsers or from the need to manage multiple blogs (see below).

Given the acceleration of the blogosphere, I would expect the numbers of new bloggers seeking easier blog management tools to increase, and that we'll see a lot of fluctuation in the percentages for many years to come, as new bloggers become experienced bloggers at a faster rate.

I believe that the tools to help newbie bloggers are becoming more sophisticated, decreasing the learning curve required to use them. That being said, once bloggers reach a certain stage of knowledge, they will begin to want tools to help them increase productivity and to bypass the restriction of blog platform interfaces.

(n=102)

I was mildly surprised to find that most of our bloggers had more than one blog. It makes sense, given that blogging tools such as Qumana make cross-publishing simple, and take away the pain of managing and posting to multiple blogs.

Given our data, 38% of bloggers had 3 to 5 blogs. There was a jump from one blog, 32% to 3-5, with fewer bloggers at 2 blogs (21%). My guess is, if bloggers follow my own pattern, jumping to two is just a stepping stone to more.

Of those bloggers who have 3 to 5 blogs, 70% have been blogging for one year or more. This shows, quite clearly, that the longer you blog, the more likely you are to have more than one blog.

Oddly enough, we have a single lone blogger out there blogging 3 to 5 blogs with less than 2 months experience - I'd say watch out for that one!

(n=103)

38% of bloggers surveyed spend more than 6 hours per week plugging away at their blogs. We have a few bloggers playing around at less than 2 hours per week, which is not really very much time at all. Of those bloggers who have 3 to 5 blogs, 24% spend 3 to 5 hours a week blogging.

One thing to think about here - do we really realize how much time we actually spend blogging each day? I doubt we'd even like to admit that to ourselves.

More data to come: Keep your eye out for future information on time spent reading blogs, blogger demographics, opinions on advertising, and the great feedback we've received about Qumana.

Survey reliability: The survey seems to fairly represent new bloggers, experienced bloggers, and a good cross section of careers, blog topics, and more. However, despite this diversity, the data may not represent the true blogosphere due to the nature of the survey and its restriction to only those bloggers using Qumana.

Technorati Tags: qumana, survey, blogging, blogosphere, bloggers, blogging survey