Blogads Wants an Advertising Network of 10,000 Blogs

Posted on November 23, 2005

ClickZ reports that Blogads' Henry Copeland said he wants to expand the blogs in his advertising blog network from 900 blogs to 10,000 blogs by this time next year.

Copeland does have some basis for that claim. "There are about 18 million people [currently] blogging," he said. Let's say that's the number of people who have set up blogs. The number of people actively blogging is, say, half of that. Of that number, how many regularly update content? How many update their blogs weekly, or even daily? The reality is there are maybe 10,000 to 100,000 really active (hourly or daily) bloggers who get significant traffic numbers.
Maybe 10,000 to 100,000 doesn't sound like very many active blogs. But consider this: There are 49,000 daily journalists in the U.S. Conceivably, there are more well-informed, active bloggers out there than active journalists. That's potentially tens of thousands of really influential people. People with an audience. An audience you can reach through their blogs.

Only focusing on very active bloggers doesn't jibe too well with the long-tail theory but we have seen similar comments from Bloglines about the "feeds that matter." In October, Bloglines reported that they only had 437 feeds with over 1,000 subscribers. The bottom line is that a blog, feed, magazine or newspaper needs readers to attract advertisers.