I saw a “Blog Readership Report” [PDF file] by Vizu circulating the web last week that shared the results of a research that observed how blog readers acted around different blogs. While the study was a good way to find out more about human behavior on blogs and I recommend similar studies in the future, I caution against jumping to conclusions without understanding how to read such reports. Many bloggers consider the study as being the definitive proof that everyone online acts the same way as the majority of the people in that study did. I cannot think of a more premature reaction to such a survey.

How people are misunderstanding some of the results

The survey ran from November 20th to December 4th, on around 40-50 English language blogs, and on 12 Spanish language blogs. The number of people responding to each survey question varied. You should realize that just because a survey was done consisting of many blogs does not mean the same rule will apply to you and your blog; that survey helps many blogs, but you have to find out if it helps your blog. It also means that you now have a conflict on your hands, since if you aim to do what the majority of the survey respondents wanted, you will not be pleasing the rest of the blog readers.

Following are some results from the report, and how people are jumping to conclusions based the results:

• 67.3% people surveyed follow links on other blogs in order to find new sites.

  This is an impressive number. 67.3% would be considered the majority in a democratic society. Online, such a survey percentage means that if you link to another blog, most of the people will click that link. I am noticing that many people online are assuming that such a result means having links in posts is guaranteed to work for majority of the readers. My question is simple: How can you assume something to work on the almost billion of online users or even millions of blog readers based on a survey question taken by 214 people? Are you too desperate to hold on to numbers in order to stick with what you stubbornly believe in?

  Also, what about the other 33.7% of the people who do not follow links on blogs? They find blogs through other methods. Should you try to please everyone, or should you only please the majority?

• 43.6% prefer a topical focus.

  It is funny how in other areas of the report, people focus on the majority numbers, whereas in this specific question, many people focused on the 43.6%. A topical focus means a specific topic. That means 43.6% people like to read a blog that has a specific topic that it talks about on a regular basis. While people are jumping and saying “Yes! I always knew having a focused blog was good!“, I would like to remind those people that they also jump for other parts of the survey when majority of the respondents agree to something, but in this case, they are not jumping to the majority 57.4% of the blog readers who read blogs that do not have a topical focus.

  Again, should you apply this very result to your site when it was taken by 263 people? We also do not know about all the topics involved, and we do not know if the topical blog readers were influenced because of finding topics based on language. Can you really go ahead and jump to conclusions based on this? In this case, having a topical blog actually makes you disappoint the majority 57.4%, the majority which you were trying to please in other questions.

• 76.9% of the readers do not post comments on blogs.

  76.9% of the people on the survey, which consisted of 281 people for this specific question, do not like to comment. Does that mean you have to get rid of comments from your blog? How come we all say we value commenting and we say we love pleasing the majority of the people, but we skip this very important result from this survey?

  Again, we should see whether or not the results are affected because of the language, and also because of the time frame when the survey was done, which was for most part a busy holiday season. Also, are the blog readers from the survey the same as the blog readers you have? That is an important question that you need to survey yourself to find out the answer to.

• Spanish speakers read more blogs than English speakers.

  This is also an interesting one that is making many people run around in circles with joy for unknown reasons. According to the survey, there are 2 major results:

  1. 30.8% of the 263 English speaking blog readers read 3-4 blogs regularly.
  2. 43.3% of the 300 Spanish speaking blog readers read more than 10 blogs regularly.

  These two results are making some believe that Spanish blogs are more fun, while some are saying that this means Spanish speaking blog readers are simply hop from one site to another without reading much. My question to such people who are happy with such results is: have you noticed the number of Spanish blogs surveyed compared to the English blogs?

  Comparing 300 people from 12 Spanish blogs with 263 people from more than 40 English speaking blogs is far from a balanced comparison. Such a result means that the 300 Spanish speaking people have more things in common because they hang around those 12 blogs, while the survey for English readers was done on more than 40 blogs meaning there will be more people who will have differences because of the large number of blogs involved for English readers compared to Spanish readers. How can such a result be applied to any blog out of the blue?

I hope the above examples show you that such a survey is extremely important in understanding human behavior on blogs. However, such a survey is also a very bad reason to use when implementing things on our sites or sticking to what we believe unless we know our blog and our blog readers are compatible with the survey. Of course, many blogs love claiming that they have always been right because of the survey results. I would like to claim that generalizing ideas about millions of blog readers who visit millions of blogs based on a study of around 200-300 people visiting a total of around 52-62 blogs is something that people would do in the offline world if they wanted to create stereotypes.

How should we report and react to such surveys then?

I like the way Daniel reported the Blog Readership Report on Daily Blog Tips; he mentioned some of the important facts, and left the analysis of those facts up to you. I think all facts should be mentioned that way without jumping to conclusions, instead of saying things that do not have any ground to stand on.

Learn from the survey and see how it applies to you. Instead of only promoting numbers that you find attractive, understand everything. If you do not read the report yourself and understand it correctly, why would your blog readers read your analysis of the report? Do not rush to conclusions simply because it makes for a good blog post. When studied carefully, the number of people and blogs in the survey shows who can use the information from the survey. It also shows who needs to do their own survey on their own blogs to confirm the existence of specific trends.

This survey gives us an idea of what happens on some blogs. It does not give us proof that the same will happen on our blog. I would recommend doing your own survey or even contacting Vizu to see how they did the survey as they already have experience doing a great job with this report.

If you wish, you can download the Blog Readership Report PDF file, which requires a free PDF viewing software like Foxit PDF Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader. Both are free to download and use.