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Newspaper circulation continues to decline

Stowe Boyd reports that newspaper circulation continues to decline at major newspapers with most down about 10% in the past year.  Given that the largest decline occurred at the San Fransisco Chronicle with a 16% circulation decline year-over-year, we should conclude that the newspapers are getting hit hard by the combination of blogging and RSS.

Techies vs. Regular People

I've been crunching my Adsense data along with data from my sites and have noticed that, from a financial perspective, getting heavily-tech oriented people to visit my sites has little value.  This could explain why many bloggers don't expect to make money from their blogs.

To be fair, if I had a site that was of tremendous value to techies and have very relevant Adsense ads, revenue could be better.  But by and large, "regular" internet users are far more interesting from an Adsense perspective, especially for topical and special interest sites.

39,000 spam blogs ("splogs") created in past two weeks

Technorati says that about 39,000 splogs ("spam blogs") have been created in the past two weeks, many coming from Google's Blogspot.

Counting the number of blogs globally

Back in May 2005, I did a quick exercise where I estimated there could be about 100 million blogs in the world.  According to the CIA's World Factbook, there are about 600 million internet users worldwide.  Using a ballpark estimate of 10% blog penetration, this says there are about 60 million individuals worldwide who have a blog.  This is within reason of other estimates.  Within a few years, 100 million bloggers are possible worldwide.

Now, the Blog Herald is estimating the number of blogs worldwide is more than 100 million, including 6 million in China.  This estimate is much more scientific than my back-of-the-envelope calculation and I recommend this site as the resource for official global estimates.

Yet, search engines that track blogs can only find a fraction of these.  Technorati is currently tracking 19 million blogs and the number of blogs they are tracking doubles every 5 months.   BlogPulse is tracking about 17 million blogs.

SquirrelNet.com has an interesting article on People Who Underestimate Blogs.

Don't measure popularity/buzz via search engine "hits"

In a Wall Street Journal article called Estimates for Web Search Results
Are Often Wildly Off the Mark, The Numbers Guy points out that too many people are using web "hits" to define how popular a certain topic is.  See that article for his eloquent explanation, but a quick example will suffice.

Example:  You do a web searches for New York Yankees and Cincinnati Reds and try to determine the relative popularity of each by looking at the number of times each can be found on the internet.  What will skew the results is when all MLB baseball teams are listed on the same page, so you won't get a fair measurement.

In terms of measuring buzz for a topic, I recommend BlogPulse Trend Search.