Reporting a growth rate of nearly 3 million blogs per month, Technorati’s 2011 State of the Blogosphere Report has chosen this year to display their results according to five different types of bloggers:  Hobbyist, Professional Part-time, Professional Full-time, Corporate and Entrepreneur.

The backbone of the blogosphere, and representing 60% of the respondents to this survey, Hobbyists say that they “blog for fun” and do not report any income. Half of hobbyists prefer to express their “personal musings” when blogging. 60% indicate they spend less than three hours a week blogging, yet half of hobbyists respond individually to comments from readers. Because 72% blog to speak their minds, their main success metric is personal satisfaction (61%).

In their research, Technorati has lumped in all of the bloggers that do not generate revenue from their blogging as hobbyists. However, many edubloggers, if not the majority, do not derive revenues from blogging. Yet the edublogger’s purpose is not simply for fun, but rather for learning. Technorati’s types of bloggers clearly ignore the real motivations of a subset of the blogger population. Technorati indicate that  hobbyists report blogging for fun “blog for fun”: I strongly suspect that the survey question was a not an open-ended and that an option to self-identify as an edublogger was not available (I cannot verify this as unfortunately the survey is no longer available).

Technorati nonetheless provides some valuable statistics of about bloggers. However, we will have to wait and see if in 2012 they will truly get to the heart of the matter: what are the real motivations of 60% of the blogger population?

Reference:

• 2011 State of the Blogosphere Report | Technorati | 4 November 2011