June 5, 2009 - 5:00am
BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners conducted a research titled the “2009 Social Media Study” and found that women are turning to all sorts of social media for fun, entertainment, community and connection, says eMarketer. The report shows that 53% of the US female Internet population of 79 million actively participated in some type of social media at least on a weekly basis.
According to the research 75% of the female social media participants took part in social networking and 55% used blogs. Still a great number of these women were not just reading information. The study reveals that 12 million posted to blogs and 8 million published them.
Yet, women give their preference to blogs rather than social media when it comes to providing advice or contributing to a community. Women are so enthusiastic about reading and writing blogs, they are stealing time from other media to spend more in the blogosphere and on social network sites.
In addition eMarketer also conducted an interview with Elisa Camahort Page, COO of BlogHer over the monetization potential of blogging.
Answering the question about what factors account for the growth in the numbers of bloggers and blog readers Camahort said that one of the reasons is that it is to publish a blog. “You don’t have to know HTML to be publishing online. It’s also very affordable. A lot of the software tools are free. Plus, more and more sites are adding opportunities to blog without having to even run your own site,” she noted.
She thinks that there are four drivers for why women read and write blogs. Camahort says:
“The first is self-expression. The second is to build their community. The third is for information and advice. And the fourth is just for fun and entertainment. There’s a lot of great writing out there, and reading a blog can be just as fun or fulfilling as reading a great novel or watching a sitcom.
Making money is not among the top motivators.
For almost every blogger I know, making money is awesome, and they want to do a good job and improve their sites if it helps them do better at that. But it doesn’t outweigh the fact that they want to maintain their community, that they want to be able to express themselves and they want to be a great resource and find great resources they can trust.”
Camahort also noted that recession times greatly influenced the topics discussed by the bloggers.
” All bloggers, like any other media out there, want to be relevant to their audience and their community. And a lot of their audience and community not only may have less money, but they may have less time to spend being entertained by all of us bloggers because they’re worried about their job or they’re now working two jobs. So you’ll see a lot of bloggers starting to incorporate recession-oriented content into what they do,” she says.
“For instance, there’s a blogger called Wine-Girl, who’s an award-winning wine writer who keeps a blog. And she has started a Recession Wine of the Week—where she talks about how to get a great bottle of wine for less than $10,” adds Camahort.
Source: eMarketer
According to the research 75% of the female social media participants took part in social networking and 55% used blogs. Still a great number of these women were not just reading information. The study reveals that 12 million posted to blogs and 8 million published them.
Yet, women give their preference to blogs rather than social media when it comes to providing advice or contributing to a community. Women are so enthusiastic about reading and writing blogs, they are stealing time from other media to spend more in the blogosphere and on social network sites.
In addition eMarketer also conducted an interview with Elisa Camahort Page, COO of BlogHer over the monetization potential of blogging.
Answering the question about what factors account for the growth in the numbers of bloggers and blog readers Camahort said that one of the reasons is that it is to publish a blog. “You don’t have to know HTML to be publishing online. It’s also very affordable. A lot of the software tools are free. Plus, more and more sites are adding opportunities to blog without having to even run your own site,” she noted.
She thinks that there are four drivers for why women read and write blogs. Camahort says:
“The first is self-expression. The second is to build their community. The third is for information and advice. And the fourth is just for fun and entertainment. There’s a lot of great writing out there, and reading a blog can be just as fun or fulfilling as reading a great novel or watching a sitcom.
Making money is not among the top motivators.
For almost every blogger I know, making money is awesome, and they want to do a good job and improve their sites if it helps them do better at that. But it doesn’t outweigh the fact that they want to maintain their community, that they want to be able to express themselves and they want to be a great resource and find great resources they can trust.”
Camahort also noted that recession times greatly influenced the topics discussed by the bloggers.
” All bloggers, like any other media out there, want to be relevant to their audience and their community. And a lot of their audience and community not only may have less money, but they may have less time to spend being entertained by all of us bloggers because they’re worried about their job or they’re now working two jobs. So you’ll see a lot of bloggers starting to incorporate recession-oriented content into what they do,” she says.
“For instance, there’s a blogger called Wine-Girl, who’s an award-winning wine writer who keeps a blog. And she has started a Recession Wine of the Week—where she talks about how to get a great bottle of wine for less than $10,” adds Camahort.
Source: eMarketer