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77% of Internet Users Read Blogs – or do they?

A new report from Universal McCann seems to be, at first glance, full good news for bloggers:

Globablly 73% of internet users are reading blogs with 48% including these (sic!) consumer-generated content in their weekly media diet.

The latest survey from media agency Universal McCann shows no signs of a pause in the explosive growth of social media. Video clips, blogs, podcasts, social networks and RSS are all essential components of the online media diet.

South Korea leads the pack here with 77% of internet users reading blogs once a week. Interestingly, in South Korea, only 58% of users read the mainstream press.

The question here, of course, is the old “what is a blog?” McCann doesn’t give us access to the full report, but to assume that everything published in a blog-style format is consumer-generated content is a bit of a stretch. There is no need to further chew on that question, but it does throw the data from this report into question.

I have no doubt that more and more people are reading blogs in some form or another, but 73% seems to be quite a stretch…

I think this number is way too high to be accurate, in my opinion anyway. I just asked the people immediately around me (I consult at a large corporation) if they knew what a blog was and out of the 10 or so that I asked, only 1 knew what it even was.

Probably too high. I will note that my 67 year old father is a regular reader of lucianne.com, which aggregates political news stories and lets readers have at it on each article. I guess you’d call that a blog.