世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently published extracted highlights from goo Research’s 28th regular blogging survey. This time, one of the reported statistics was on why people quit. At the start of November 1,041 members of goo Research’s monitor pool replied to the online questionnaire. 53.5% of the sample was female, 2.3% in their teens, 24.0% in their twenties, 38.7% in their thirties, 21.7% in their forties, 10.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% aged sixty or older.

I felt the answers to the quitting reason were a bit difficult to interpret (from a logical point of view, not from a translation one!), especially the top reason, given by over two-thirds, of updating being just too much of a pain – 「更新が面倒になったから」, “henshin ga mendouni nattakara”. I’ve not used the Japanese blogging services so I don’t know how user-friendly they are, but was it formatting the content that was awkward, or maintaining the design, pruning spam, replying to comments, or other housekeeping tasks?

For me personally, I’ve thought about quitting for time reasons and a lack of search engine positioning; I don’t try any particular SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques, but with nearly 500 distinct articles in Google and friends, I get a disappointingly low number of visits – I just recently got through 200 per day excluding one dodgy pr0n keyword that gives me just a bit too much traffic.

Q1: Within the last month have you viewed someone else’s blog? (Sample size=1,041)

Yes	80.5%
No	17.1%
Don’t really know what a blog is	2.4%

Note that 83.1% of women versus 77.5% of men had viewed a blog in the last month.

Q2: Have you made a blog yourself? (Sample size=1,041)

Currently maintaining one	28.7%
Used to maintain one (to SQ)	12.8%
No, but want to make one	21.9%
No, and don’t want to make one	32.9%
Don’t really know what a blog is	3.8%

Q2SQ: Why did you quit blogging? (Sample size=133, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Updating was too much trouble	89	66.9%
Got bored with it	29	21.8%
SNS (mixi, etc) is more fun	23	17.3%
Ran out of things to say	22	16.5%
No particular reason	17	12.8%
Too few visitors	13	9.8%
Got hit by flame war, spam attack, etc	3	2.3%
Other	9	6.8%

Next, there was a question for the current bloggers on how often they updated. The top frequency was twice or thrice a week, with 30.8% posting that often. Next was daily with 24.8%, then once a week with 19.7%. In total, just about three-quarters updated at least once a week.

Asked why they blogged, the top answer was just as a sort of notebook, then to share information with others, then to let others know my own opinions.