Nielsen: One-Third Of Bloggers Are Moms

It’s difficult to define the typical blogger, but new research from Nielsen/McKinsey says that more than two million of them are moms.

In a blog post yesterday, Nielsen says that about 6.7 million people are currently using blogging websites — which I take to mean sites like Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr and services like those. Of that number, When other blog-related sites are included, Nielsen says about one-third are moms and 52 percent of bloggers are parents with kids under 18 years old. Nielsen doesn’t specifically use the phrase “mommy bloggers,” though, which indicates a specific type/style of blog and content; Nielsen only says that a couple million moms are blogging.

[Ed. note: see postscript below for clarity on the edit above.]

Nielsen also says that the majority of bloggers are female, and that half of them are young — in the age 18-34 demographic.

Is There A “Typical” Blogger?

Nielsen’s statistics contradict the “State of the Blogosphere” report that Technorati publishes every year. The most recent version was published last fall, and in that survey, about 60 percent of respondents were male and more than half were between 25 and 44 years old. A little less than half indicated that they’re parents.

All of which goes to show, I think, that there’s really no such thing as a typical blogger. We come in all shapes and sizes, as the saying goes. It’s especially difficult to pin down who is or isn’t a blogger because of the blurring lines between having a blog and having a website. You can be a (self-hosted) WordPress user, for example, without being a blogger.

Then there’s also micro-blogging services such as Twitter, status updates on Facebook — which can now be as wordy as blog posts (almost as wordy as books, for that matter) — and long-form, blog-style posts on Google+. How do all those things fit in when trying to measure or define the typical blogger?

One thing that most can agree on is that blogging has been growing and will continue to grow moving forward. Emarketer has previously estimated that business blogging will grow to 43 percent of all US companies this year. And in its report this week, Nielsen says that it’s now keeping tabs on about 173 million blogs worldwide — about a 500 percent increase from 35.7 million blogs back in 2006.

Postscript: The headline for this article has been updated to more accurately reflect the information in Nielsen’s post. Nielsen contacted us after this article was published to clarify its numbers:

When we mentioned that 1/3rd of bloggers are moms, we counted blogs both on blogging sites (which you correctly ID as Blogger, etc.) AND blogs on social networks (like Facebook). Combining these sources, Nielsen found that there were about 17.7 million bloggers and nearly 6 million were moms!