Digital Trends

A new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project takes a look at who writers blogs: surprise! They're usually under 30, and like to talk about themselves.

A new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project takes a look at bloggers: who they are, what they write, for whom they write, and why they write. Contrary to media hype, the survey finds that only a small percentage of bloggers concentrate on politics, government, technology or media—instead, most bloggers focus on their own lives and experience, on sharing individual stories and knowledge, and keeping in touch with family and friends.

The survey also turned up some interesting numbers. First, while bloggers' ages vary widely across the demographic range, they tend to be young. Some 54 percent of bloggers surveyed were under 30 years of age, and more than half live in suburban areas. Roughly one third live in urban areas,and 13 percent live in rural areas.

Bloggers are somewhat less likely to be Caucasian then the typical U.S. Internet population: 60 percent of bloggers said they were white, eleven percent were African American, 19 percent are English-speaking Hispanic, and 10 percent identify with another racial group.

Overall, bloggers seem to view their activities as a personal pursuit, although a surprising number (44 percent) say they've had material published elsewhere. Some 37 percent of loggers say their main topic is their own lives and experiences; only 11 percent of bloggers said their primarily wrote about politics and government. However, that's still more than celebrities and other topics: seven percent of bloggers said they covered entertainment, six percent covered sports, five percent covered business and current events, four percent technology (respectively), and two percent were concerned with religion or spirituality.

Amusingly, some 55 percent of bloggers report they publish under a pseudonym, and 84 percent of bloggers consider their blog a hobby, rather than something in which they invest significant time and effort.

Although the numbers (and questions—check out the questionnaire) are interesting and may point to some larger trends, as with all surveys, this one has to be taken with a few grains of sale. Although it's unusual for the PIAL, this particular report isn't based on a very large number of respondents: instead, samples were collected from several recent general population surveys: while those covered over 7,000 people, they only hit a little over 300 bloggers, so questions related to blogging-specific topics have a high margin of error (±7 percent).