1/4 of Gen Y blogs, Charlene Li says.

Moderator, Charlene Li
Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.

Forrester Research's inimitable Charlene Li reports that 24% of 18-24 year-olds read blogs. double the rate of the aging Gen X-ers. Charlene is currently on the sort of trip to Japan and Korea that Rick Segal and I recently postponed, where she's meeting with lots of social media people and hearing about what they are up to. When she gets back here, I'll bribe her with free Starbuck's Coffees and see if I can get a brain dump.

Gen Y is most important, more important than many companies realize. In a very short time these college-aged kids will become employees, customers and startup threats to a great many companies worldwide. these kids read blogs, not newspapers. They find jobs online, not through help wanted or executive recruiters. They may never actually blog themselves, but the best and brightest of them will be reluctant I think, to join companies that does not permit them to use the social tools with which they came of age.

Comments

[Heather]

I'm not at all surprised by this, but aging Gen X-ers? Ouch.

[shel israel]

Heather, chile. At my age, I can say such things. My generation was called boomers and we've now hit a point in life where we can hardly boom, probably from too much inhaling in our youth.

[Joe McCarthy]

Interesting, but much lower than I would have expected.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project's (PIP) recent report on Bloggers: a portrait of the new Internet storytellers estimates that 8% of U.S. adult internet users are now blogging (writing blogs), and 39% of U.S. adult internet users are reading blogs. An earlier report on Internet Penetration and Impact estimated that 73% of U.S. adults are Internet users ... which, combined with the most recent report, suggests that approximately 28% of all U.S. adults read blogs.

An earlier PIP report on Teen Content Creators and Consumers estimated that 19% of U.S. teens (ages 12-17 ... er, Gen Z?) were writing blogs and 57% were reading blogs, so I would have expected that a far larger proportion -- say, 40-45% -- of Gen Y would be reading blogs.

Oh, and FWIW, the most recent report also notes that 82% of bloggers post comments ... but I wonder what percentage of the overall U.S. adult internet user population posts comments on blogs. I suspect that people who write their own blogs are far more likely to post commments on others' blogs.

[Joe McCarthy]

I did some more research, and found a collection of Pew reports that, together, suggest the proportion of Gen Yers who read blogs is, indeed, 45%.

Rather than consume more space here, I brought it back to my blog, in a rather long post on Participation in the Blogosphere: Reading, Writing and Commenting.

I tried to trackback to this blog post, but it has not appeared, so I figured I'd leave a comment, in case any of this is interesting to you (or other readers). I was also unable to trackback to Charlene's post, and so left another comment there.

I'm not sure why trackbacks aren't working here or on Charlene's blog. I've successfully used them in another recent post ... in which, ironically, I note a pet peeve about filtering or moderation of comments (that I would extend to trackbacks) -- mechanisms which seem to support, at best, a half-naked conversation.