The number of blogs in the world today is huge. Tumblr and WordPress alone have over 157 million blogs. But who reads them all? Following a similar report from last year we now have new and interesting facts that can tell you who reads the world’s top blogs. One thing that took us by surprise was that the average reader of the top blogs is older than we thought. Read on to find all the statistics, some massive charts, and interesting conclusions.
You can read about our methodology at the end of the article.
Age distribution varies a lot between top blogs
First up, let’s look at which top blogs are popular among groups of people of a certain age. One of the things that struck us was that there is a big spread between the different blogs.
For a larger version of the chart, click here.
A few things worth noting:
- The blog with the biggest share of older readers is The Caucus, with 25% of its readers being older than 64.
- In contrast, Engadget, Joystiq, and Ars Technica have no readers over 64.
- Ars Technica is the only blog with no readers younger than 25 years old, and no readers older than 54.
The average top blog reader is about 41 years old
Let’s now take a look at the average age of the readers of the different blogs. For all the top blogs, the average reader is about 41 years old, and the median age is 38 years.
For a larger version of the chart, click here.
We would like to highlight a few numbers:
- The blog that best represents the median (typical) reader is SB Nation.
- The average reader is best represented by those who read Gothamist.
- Hypebeast is the blog with the youngest average reader, 28.5 years.
- Michelle Malkin has the blog with the oldest average reader, 52.2 years.
- The spread between the highest and the lowest average reader among all blogs is 23.7 years.
- There are 54 blogs were the average age is higher than the median age.
What about the gender distribution among the top blogs?
Finally, when looking at the gender distribution among the top blogs, we found that the average top blog has 45% female and 55% male readers.
For a larger version of the chart, click here.
Here are a few numbers that caught our attention:
- There are four blogs that have exactly the same distribution as the average: Daily Kos, PetaPixel, Towleroad News, and Cinema Blend.
- 59 of the 80 blogs we studied are dominated by male readers and 12 of female readers.
- Nine blogs have a 50/50 distribution in their readership between men and women.
- Hollywood Life is the blog with the highest share of female readers, 63%.
- Android Authority, on the other hand, has the highest share of male readers, 70%
Summarizing blog readership demographics in 2013
What surprised us the most when putting together this study was the “high” average and median age of the top blog readers. This, together with the wide range of age distribution, leads us to conclude that among the world’s top blogs there is something for everyone.
One thing to notice is that of all the blogs in the world, this study covers only a very small selection, which deals with just a few of all the subjects that blogs of today covers. If it were possible to do this for all the blogs in the world, the demographics may be quite different. What do you think would be the biggest difference? Please, let us know in the commentary field below.
Data information: We used the Technorati Top 100 blogs for the ranking (data collected 2013-02-28). For data concerning gender and age, we used Google ad planner. As can be seen, 20 blogs are missing from the top 100, and that is because there was no available data for these blogs in Google ad planner.
