Do a quick Google search for “blogging statistics” and you’ll find some really good posts. Unfortunately, a lot of them are writing about the same stats from the same studies and surveys.
Today I’ve got a new set of statistics to add to the mix that looks at things like why people start blogs, the goals they’re trying to achieve, the amount of income they make, the challenges they face, etc.
I’m going to update this post every year with new stats, and I’ll also ask other bloggers and websites to do their own surveys so we can cover a bunch of different niches, get a bigger sample size, and more.
Let’s take a look at the graphic summary and then we can talk about some of the insights and what they might mean below.
If you’d like a PDF format of the results you can download it here. Feel free to also embed the graphic on your own blog. I’d really appreciate a cheeky share of this infographic on Pinterest if you’ve got an account. They take ages to put together and it’d really help me out.
So what to these stats tell us about bloggers?
When I did this survey I really wanted to get a broad range of information while steering clear of questions about things like “blogging platforms” because those stats get updated by all those sites annually anyway.
Some of the things I found most interesting included:
- People start blogs for different reasons — Almost half of bloggers surveyed said they started their blog as a hobby, while the other half was largely about making some kind of income.
- The income earned varies a lot — One person was making over $1m from their blog, but most people are making zero income from their blog. At first that concerned me, but when you relate that to the “hobby stat” above it makes sense. It also makes sense in relation to the next point.
- Most bloggers don’t devote a lot of time to it — I was surprised to see that most people spend less than five hours a week blogging (which won’t lead to many results), even though quite a lot of people have been doing it more than a year. Again, this might correlate to the goals.
- Most bloggers have a supporting job or partner — It was really cool to see that people are supporting their blogging goals with another job, or the income of their partner. Hopefully that means a lot of family are supporting their blogging ambitions.
- A lack of readers is the biggest worry — I was very interested to see that the thing that worries most bloggers is a lack of traffic to their blog and not things like security, coding, etc. This might make for a good new focus on Blog Tyrant.
- Most bloggers do it all themselves — One concerning survey response was the fact that over 80% of bloggers do all the work themselves without outsourcing any tasks. This is a really common issue with small business owners, and often means you can’t be as effective as possible. Again, we might need more content about this.
While not the biggest sample size, I think this survey can really help us to understand some of the factors that lead to blogging success while knowing the goals of the blogger, and I’m going to use it as a basis for further posts that address these issues.
What statistic do you find most interesting?
I’d love to know which stat you find most interesting and what it tells you about blogging. If you have any ideas about future surveys, bloggers you’d like to see stats from, etc. then please drop a comment below and let me know. I want to keep this post constantly firing with new stats!