UK blog visitors reach an all time high

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The latest research from Hitwise Intelligence reveals that UK Internet visits to blogs reached an all time high last week.

In fact if you look at the monthly data you can see that the market share of blogs has increased steadily over the last three years and has increased by 208% compared to ‘traditional’ news and media sites which have also increased significantly by 70%.

Another interesting statistic  is that the market share of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73% respectively.

Hitwise’s Robin Goad cites yesterday’s launch of Apple’s 3G iPhone as an example of the influence of blogs. Gadget and Apple-related blogs sent more traffic to the iPhone site than the traditional IT media.

Another fascinating fact about blog traffic is the diversity of search terms that people use to find them. The highest ranked term was ‘club penguin cheats’ yet it accounted for just 0.39% of the 518,000 search terms.

The final interesting piece of data for me was the importance of Google image search, which was the second largest individual source of traffic after Google UK and even more tellingly 7.85% of all traffic from Google UK Image Search went to blogs, second only to social networks and forums.

The significance of image search for public relations people is that it highlights just one of the many business benefits of a social media news room and social media news releases. Content is no longer being created just for the privileged ranks of journalists, but for thousands of ‘citizen journalists’ who simply want to talk about what they like on whatever user-generated content site they happen to use. But this means we must be much more focused on customer engagement and what the people want rather than what the client or business wants to tell them.