It seems lately that there are more and more surveys going on about the blogging world, from the types of people that are reading them on through to the types of people that create them. The folks over at BlogAds have conducted their own survey now of blog readership and published the results.

This survey has a fairly large sample, almost 18K readers were polled. The greatest fault with this survey, unfortunately, is that it was completely self-selecting, and, as a result, very biased in terms of providing a generalized report on the types of people that read blogs. As the survey notes:

To be clear, the survey’s responses are a fragment of a sample of a subset. There are millions of bloggers. On Monday morning, I e-mailed roughly 50 of them — some of the biggest bloggers, many of whom focus on politics and/or sell blogads — suggesting they link to they survey. I explained that the survey would “boost both public appreciation of blogging AND your revenues.” Some of the bloggers I wrote to (and some I didn’t) linked to the survey; some of their readers clicked; some were offended by questions written mostly for Americans; some aspiring respondents were unable to complete Surveymonkey’s sometimes buggy forms. So wield a salt shaker as you munch on this data.

Source: BlogAds.com, Survey Results

Despite this lack of randomness, I think the results are still valuable though not predictive. Here’s the summary of the findings:

This survey shows that blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.

Moreover, blog readers are more cyber-active than I’d hoped: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:

  • 50% have spent more than $50 online on books.
  • 47% have spent more than $500 online for plane tickets.
  • 50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate, and 5% have contributed more than $1000. (Only 25% of NYTimes.com readers have contributed anything online in the last year.)

Blog readers are media-mavens: 21% subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, 15% to the Economist, 15% to Newsweek and 14% to the Atlantic Monthly.

Source: BlogAds.com, Survey Results

Fortunately, this is a sign of things to come. As any industry begins to entrench itself into our daily lives, there comes a need to understand, rationalize , and eventually commoditize the forces at work.