世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s 26th monthly survey on blogging. 1,075 people from goo’s internet monitor group successfully completed a private questionnaire at the start of July. The demographics were 58.4% female, 3.3% in their teens, 25.6% in their twenties, 39.4% in their thirties, 22.0% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, and 2.0% aged sixty or over.

Looking at the headline, if you discount the “don’t knows” as having too little traffic to bother counting, on a good day I’m in the top 2% percent of Japanese blogs traffic-wise! Of course, another explanation is that the bloggers with more traffic are too busy keeping their sites ticking over to bother answering questionnaires.

It also may be instructive to cross-reference these results with over 90% of bloggers being anonymous and most bloggers earning peanuts in affiliate schemes.

Q1: In the last month, have you viewed someone else’s blog? (Sample size=1,075)

Yes	79.4%
No	18.5%
Don’t really know what a blog is	2.1%

In addition, 32.0% (of the total sample or of those who have viewed a blog, I don’t know) have commented on someone else’s blog.

Q2: Do you have a blog? (Sample size=1,075)

Yes (to SQs)	36.7%
No, but I want to try to make one	27.2%
No, and don’t want to make one	34.0%
Don’t really know what a blog is	2.1%

Q2SQ1: How many blog accounts do you have? (Sample size=395)

One	57.2%
Two	24.6%
Three	10.9%
Four	3.5%
Five or more	3.8%

Note that this question above refers specifically to account IDs rather than actual blogs, so with services like Blogger where one account can create multiple blogs, it’s the one user ID rather than the multiple blogs that would be counted.

Asked about how often they updated their blogs, the most common answer was twice or thrice a week, with just over a quarter (25.6%) reporting that, followed by 21.0% who updated almost every day, then 14.4% were weekly. In total, around three in five Japanese bloggers update at least once per week. For people with multiple blogs, I don’t know if this figure refers to the frequency per blog or in total.

Q2SQ2: About how many visitors does your blog get per day? (Sample size=395)

	Votes	Percentage
Basically no-one	57	14.4%
One to four visitors	88	22.3%
Five to nine visitors	66	16.7%
Ten to forty-nine visitors	91	23.0%
Fifty to ninety-nine visitors	32	8.1%
100 to 299 visitors	12	3.0%
300 to 999 visitors	3	0.8%
1000 to 2999 visitors	3	0.8%
3000 to 9999 visitors	0	0.0%
Over 10,000 visitors	0	0.0%
Don’t know	43	10.9%