Blog networking has always combined publishing with participation. Historical Pew Research Center figures from 2004–2006 show how blogging connected personal expression, audience-building, sharing, and conversation. The figures below are legacy research results from the named Pew reports; they describe their original measurement periods and are not presented as independently re-verified current estimates.
Contents
- The early scale of blogging
- Who blogged and who read
- Access, household, and place differences
- Blogging and participatory creation
- What bloggers wrote about
- The networking features bloggers used
The early scale of blogging
The Pew Teens and Social Media 2007 report recorded a clear increase in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006. In 2004, 19% of online teens had created their own blog. By 2006, that figure was 28%. These are percentages of online teens in the report’s measured population, not estimates of all young people or all internet users.
The same report also measured blog reading, which was more common than blog creation. In 2004, 38% of online teens read blogs. In 2006, 49% did so. The two-year comparison therefore describes a growing audience as well as a larger group of young publishers. Reading was not limited to people who maintained their own blog, so the audience figure should not be treated as a count of bloggers.
Among internet users overall, the Pew Bloggers 2006 report found that 8% were bloggers. This broader measure is separate from the teen-specific figures above: it covers internet users rather than online teens and refers to the 2006 measurement period.
Taken together, these historical measures show three different layers of early blog networking: the share of internet users who blogged, the share of online teens who created blogs, and the larger share of online teens who read them. A network can expand through readers even when the number of active publishers is smaller.
Who blogged and who read
The teen figures show differences by age and gender. In 2006, 35% of online teen girls blogged, compared with 20% of online teen boys. Among older teens, 38% of girls blogged and 18% of boys blogged. The available figure for younger girls was 32%.
Blog reading also varied by age. In 2006, 40% of online teens ages 12–14 read blogs, while 58% of online teens ages 15–17 did so. Older online teens therefore represented a larger blog-reading share in this report than younger online teens.
Among teens who read blogs, 43% were boys and 57% were girls. This describes the composition of the blog-reading group; it is different from the rate at which boys or girls blogged. Keeping those two measures separate matters when interpreting community reach. A group’s share of readers does not, by itself, show its participation rate within the wider teen population.
Online frequency was another strong dividing line. In 2006, 32% of teens who went online daily kept a blog, compared with 23% of teens who went online several times per week. Daily users were also more likely to read blogs: 59% read blogs, compared with 39% of teens who went online several times per week.
The relationship between online frequency and blogging appears in both creation and readership measures:
| Online behavior in 2006 | Kept a blog | Read blogs |
|---|---|---|
| Went online daily | 32% | 59% |
| Went online several times per week | 23% | 39% |
These figures indicate association in the report’s results, not a stated causal effect. They also show why blog networking metrics should distinguish active publishing from audience attention.
Access, household, and place differences
The 2006 teen data included differences by household income and family structure. Among online teens in households earning less than $50,000 per year, 35% blogged. Among online teens in higher-income households, 24% blogged. The supplied figures do not define the exact upper-income threshold for the second group, so the comparison should retain the report’s broad labels.
Family structure was also associated with different reported blogging rates. In 2006, 42% of teens living in single-parent homes blogged, compared with 25% of teens living with married parents. These measures describe household categories in the Pew report and should not be interpreted as explanations for why an individual teen blogged.
Internet connection type showed a smaller difference. Among teens with dial-up internet access, 24% kept blogs in 2006. Among teens with broadband, 28% kept blogs. Because both percentages come from the same historical report, they provide a snapshot of blogging participation during an earlier period of changing home internet access.
The composition of blog readers also varied by community type. In 2006, 52% of blog-reading teens lived in suburban areas, 27% lived in urban areas, and 21% lived in rural areas. These values describe the geographic composition of the blog-reading teen group, not the percentage of all teens in each type of area who read blogs.
Income composition was reported in another form as well. Fourteen percent of blog-reading teens came from households earning under $30,000 annually, while 41% came from households earning $75,000 or more annually. These categories are shares of blog-reading teens, so they should not be directly compared with the earlier blogging-rate measures without a common denominator.
Blogging and participatory creation
The early blog audience was connected to a wider culture of making and sharing digital content. In 2006, 66% of teen bloggers shared content they created themselves, including drawings, stories, photos, or videos. Among non-blogging teens, 29% shared self-created content.
Remixing was also more common among teen bloggers. Forty percent of teen bloggers remixed online content into their own creations in 2006, compared with 20% of non-blogging teens. Among content-creating teens specifically, 41% had remixed online content into their own creation.
Webpage creation provides another view of the relationship between blogging and online participation. In 2006, 53% of teen bloggers created a personal webpage, compared with 17% of non-blogging teens. A separate measure found that 54% of teen bloggers created or worked on a webpage for a friend, group, or school project, compared with 25% of non-blogging teens.
These figures do not establish that blogging caused the other activities. They do show that, in the Pew Teens and Social Media 2007 results, teen bloggers were more likely than non-blogging teens to report several forms of digital creation, collaboration, and reuse.
The pattern is especially relevant to blog networking because it expands the meaning of a blog beyond a standalone diary. A personal webpage, a group project, a remixed creation, and a shared photo or story can all create additional paths between people. The measured differences suggest that blogging often appeared alongside other participatory behaviors in the same user group.
What bloggers wrote about
The Pew Bloggers 2006 report measured the main subjects bloggers wrote about. The largest category was life and experiences, reported by 37% of bloggers. Politics and government followed at 11%.
Entertainment-related topics accounted for 7% of bloggers, while 6% mainly wrote about sports. General news and current events accounted for 5%, and business also accounted for 5%. Technology was the main topic for 4% of bloggers.
| Main blog topic | Share of bloggers in 2006 |
|---|---|
| Life and experiences | 37% |
| Politics and government | 11% |
| Entertainment-related topics | 7% |
| Sports | 6% |
| General news and current events | 5% |
| Business | 5% |
| Technology | 4% |
The topic figures are categories for bloggers’ main subjects, so they do not represent every subject a blogger might have covered. They also do not measure readership, posting frequency, or the size of a blogger’s network. They are useful instead for showing the editorial center of early blogging: personal experience was the dominant reported focus, while public affairs, culture, sports, business, and technology formed smaller main-topic groups.
The networking features bloggers used
The Pew Bloggers 2006 report captured several built-in mechanisms for connecting a blog to its audience and to other blogs. Eighty-seven percent of bloggers allowed comments on their blogs. Comments provided a direct route for readers to respond, making the blog more interactive than a publication with no feedback channel.
Forty-one percent of bloggers had a blogroll or friends list. This feature could identify related blogs, acquaintances, or favored sites and gave readers a path outward from one blog to another. It also made relationships and affiliations more visible within the blog network.
Eighteen percent of bloggers offered an RSS feed. Compared with comment availability, RSS was reported by a smaller share of bloggers in the 2006 data. The measure still matters because a feed supported repeat discovery and subscription-style access, allowing readers to follow updates without returning manually to every site.
Platform concentration was also reported. Twenty-two percent of bloggers used LiveJournal or MySpace, identified in the report as the top blogging sites in its sample. This platform measure is not a complete market-share estimate for every blogging service; it is the share and platform description supplied by the Pew Bloggers 2006 report.
Age provides another context for interpreting these features. Fifty-four percent of bloggers were under age 30 in 2006. The early blog network therefore included a substantial younger-adult presence, while the teen results show how blogging and blog reading were already embedded in youth online activity.
The feature figures describe the infrastructure of connection at a particular stage of blogging. Comments emphasized conversation, blogrolls and friends lists emphasized visible links, and RSS emphasized ongoing distribution. Together, they show how early blogs supported both two-way interaction and connections across sites.
For readers studying blogging and online community, the central lesson from these historical statistics is that networking was not one metric. It included creation, reading, sharing, collaboration, commenting, linking, and subscribing. The Pew Teens and Social Media 2007 and Pew Bloggers 2006 reports measured those behaviors in different populations and years, so each percentage is most useful when its denominator, geography, age group, and measurement period remain explicit.