The Narrowing Line Between Creator and Consumer

The Associated Press story focuses on blogging ("Study: Blogging Still Infrequent") and reports that between 2% and 7% of U.S. Internet users keep a blog (and 11% have read a blog.) But the story touches on only part of the big study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on content creation online (download the full report in PDF format.) The headline that Pew was pushing (and that seems far more interesting) is that 44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed content of some type to the Internet.

The most frequent kinds of content distributed? Posting personal photographs (22%) and allowing others to download music & video files from their computer (20%), followed by posting to websites (17%) and publishing your own website (13%). And these "content creators" share some of the common traits of other Internet first adopters, including being more educated than average (46% have college degrees, versus 26% of the population) and higher household income averages (31% live in households with $75K+ in annual revenue, compared to 18% of the population.)

The report also makes some interesting reflections on the kinds of groups creating content, dividing them into Power Creators, Older Creators and Content Omnivores -- whether or not these really represent distinct groups (apart from the age slice) is an open question, but their analysis raises good thoughts about some of the differences in online activities.

CyberAtlas did get an interesting quote from Amanda Lenhart (one of the Pew researchers) regarding the blogging numbers:


"'I was truly shocked by the low blogging number. With all the attention being paid to blogs these days, it's a surprise to see that everyone isn't doing it. Still somewhere between 3 and 9 million Americans are blogging, it's just not the tsunami of online journaling that I think it has been hyped up to be,' remarked Lenhart."

posted to Stats & Data on March 01, 2004