Blogroll Analysis
Following on from some of the comments on yesterday's post, one of the methods I plan to use on my chosen bloggers is blogroll analysis. I have done this before in my small pilot study, looking at gender - with the interesting result that male bloggers tend to link to other male bloggers while women bloggers have a more even-handed approach. People have commented that this may be due to the subjects on which men and women choose to blog - many female bloggers choosing to blog about family, children or domestic matters that might only attract other women (?). So what, you might think? Well, I do think that the matter needs to be debated - as they are doing at BlogHer - simply because of the economics of the situation. If advertising is creeping on to blogs, advertisers are going to want to advertise with the most 'popular' bloggers. So male bloggers become more attractive to advertisers? Of course, if you want to advertise family-related products, a female blogger would have a more targeted audience.
The other part of the analysis of blogrolls that I want to do is geographical. I haven't done this before, but from a cursory glance at blogrolls so far I am gaining the impression that locality is important. For example, I have seen several blogrolls with sections devoted to 'people in my town'. Do Brits link to Americans and Americans to Brits?
Someone asked yesterday why I hadn't enlarged the survey to include other English-language bloggers such as Australians, or - for that matter - why I hadn't considered surveying non-English blogs. I am afraid time and resources is the reason. I had to present the AHRC with a concrete plan for one woman's research (and writing up) in 8 months. Of course, the plan is to conclude that more research needs to be done in this area and then to put together another research proposal...
The other part of the analysis of blogrolls that I want to do is geographical. I haven't done this before, but from a cursory glance at blogrolls so far I am gaining the impression that locality is important. For example, I have seen several blogrolls with sections devoted to 'people in my town'. Do Brits link to Americans and Americans to Brits?
Someone asked yesterday why I hadn't enlarged the survey to include other English-language bloggers such as Australians, or - for that matter - why I hadn't considered surveying non-English blogs. I am afraid time and resources is the reason. I had to present the AHRC with a concrete plan for one woman's research (and writing up) in 8 months. Of course, the plan is to conclude that more research needs to be done in this area and then to put together another research proposal...
posted by Sarah at 9:25 AM
9 Comments:
Actually advertisers care about bloggers with the right demographic. Women control or at the very least influence the vast majority (>80%) of the household dollar spent on everything from groceries to cars to electronics, so reaching *women* online is critical. So the "popular" bloggers who have a very male-dominated readership are at a disadvantage when it comes to getting lots of kinds of advertising. My point is it's not just family or parenting product companies that want to reach women online.
Will be interested to see your analysis :)
Looking forward to the results of your blogroll analysis!
I completely agree with the comments above.
I am currently using blogads to target certain demographics for my online shop and am much keener on advertising on blogs which have a more focused readership which fit in with my target demographic rather than on those which have a huge but very general readership.
OK, so what people are saying is that women would be more attractive to advertisers than male bloggers?
I am planning to analyse how many adverts blogs show and whether they are themed, ie family, cars, computers, etc, so we will see if this theory holds water!
Gosh - all this stuff I am 'planning' to do!
'OK, so what people are saying is that women would be more attractive to advertisers than male bloggers?'
Not exactly. It depends on what you're trying to sell. But if you're trying to sell products which appeal to women aged 25-55 in the UK, as I am, then you have to look for blogs that have a readership that somewhat reflects this demographic. It's no use to me at all advertising on a blog where, for example, most of the readers are male techies in the US.
re Blogrolls. I wonder how these are populated and how that varies UK/USA and Male/Female. For example I have 3 kinds of links.
1. My "official" blogroll which comes automatically from Bloglines and so reflects the list of blogs I am currently tracking (205 at this moment).
2. A Methodist Blogroll that again is populated automatically and managed elsewhere for Methodist Blogger (majority US and male) 80 members
3. Various other manually managed links such as to the RevGalBlogPals (240 members, I am not a member).
When these links are managed in this way they have quite different feeling to blogs that have a few hand picked blogs in their blogroll. In terms of motivation I feel the accurate list of what I am reading is potentially quite revealing about myself and I am happy with that. The blog rings such as the Methodist one help with mutual ranking and do bring in a few visitors. Others are there to deliberately lend what support I can to them.
Good luck sorting *my* blogroll.
It's... umm. Huge.
One of my friends already told me about this place and I do not regret that I found this article.
You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view
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