How many Canadians have read a blog?

maggiefox, April 12 2007

That’s the 7,213,629-million citizen question, and the numbers are wildly different, depending on who you ask. Let me explain:

According to the 2006 Canadian Inter@ctive Reid Report, released by Ipsos Reid and conducted in Q4 2006, 84% of Canadians have Internet access from somewhere (27,532,935) and 36% of us have read a blog, for a grand total of 8,810,539 blog readers in Canada.

HOWEVER – comScore would tend to disagree. According to these stats, also gathered during Q4 last year, though I cannot locate the original research, only an article about it, (brought to my attention by the fine Ed Lee) 58.2% of online Canadians have visited a blog, which makes for a rather larger figure of 16,024,168 – almost double the Ipsos numbers.

Now, obviously I’m no statistician, but what gives? Why the huge disparity?

Discussion

Leona Hobbs on April 13th, 2007
Hi Maggie - I think the numbers are likely higher than the Ipsos numbers. I figure a chunk of the 84% of Canadians who have Internet access from somewhere don't know (or care) if a site they visit is technically a blog.
Social Media Group » Blog Archive » New Study on Canadians and Blogs on July 19th, 2007
[...] This time from Ipsos-Reid. Still no consensus on how many Canadians have actually read a blog (they say 34% of Cdn Internet users have visited one, while other studies have different results). [...]
Annie on October 7th, 2008
I think the way the question was asked might make a difference. In a lot of cases, people may be reading blogs but don't realize that they are blogs. So if comScore gave some specific examples (e.g. Windows Live Spaces figured prominently among their respondents), then that might have driven the numbers up because people said "oh yeah, I do read that" even though they didn't know it was a blog.

 







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