• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 14, 2005

Blog readers might still be small in number, but they are among the most influential groups in the United States, according to a study by blog ad network Blogads.com, released Friday. The report, issued by Blogads.com founder Henry Copeland, concluded that most blog readers were "involved, upscale, intelligent, individuals who also read Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Nation and WSJ.com."

For the Blogads study, Copeland surveyed more than 30,000 Internet users; respondents had visited at least one of 100 blogs to which he forwarded links to the survey.

"The crucial point we found here is 70 percent of bloggers fall into that critical demographic for advertisers known as 'influentials,'" said Copeland, who used the term "bloggers" to refer to both blog writers and readers. "These guys might be sitting in their basements, wearing pajamas, but before that they were at the town meeting, getting involved socially and politically, setting the standard."

But reading Web logs is still very much a minority pastime in the United States, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in February, and also released Friday. More than half of all U.S. adults polled--56 percent--said they had no knowledge of blogs at all, and only 32 percent of Internet users said they were very or somewhat familiar with them, according to that poll.

Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup poll, says his results are not inconsistent with Copeland's conclusion. Newport compared readers of blogs to readers of The New York Times. "We know that only a fraction of the American public reads the Times, but it affects everyone because that's what the people who control mainstream media read."

"In conducting our poll, it was not our intent to measure blogs' gross influence," said Newport. "I think it's obvious that the most influential people in our society are the ones who read these things."

Steve Rubel, blogger and CooperKatz executive, agrees that blogs' influence can't be measured just by their total traffic numbers. "It doesn't matter whether a blog is read by one or one million people, because as search and tracking tools get better, the right information will find its way into the right hands," Rubel said.

Blogads.com's survey found that 75 percent of Web log readers are over 30, 75 percent are men, 43 percent have household incomes of over $90 thousand dollars, and 14 percent are employed in the education industry.

The group polled by Blogads was found to be politically active, with 71 percent reporting that they signed a petition and 66 percent saying they contacted a politician. Fifty percent ranked blogs as having the greatest usefulness for news and opinion, and 75.3 percent said they read blogs for "news I can't find elsewhere."