Methods of experimentation: I emailed 1,000 (of which 302 responded) different bloggers with a 4-question survey that enabled me to statistically chart the diversity of both gender and race within each niche. The 4 questions were:

1. What niche does your blog fall into (Examples: Political, gadget, movie, etc…If more than one, please list)?

2. What are the genders of all the bloggers who write for your site?

3. What are the races for all the bloggers who write for your site (if there are any that you’re not sure about, just indicate that you don’t know)?

4. What do you think of the diversity of the blogosphere, both in your niche and as a whole?

I sent these surveys out over a period of several weeks and waited for them to accumulate in my inbox. After I had a representative sample from each niche, I tallied the results and then added them up.

Results: Obviously, defining race is a tricky subject, and every time someone tries to pin down a racial category, someone else can easily come up with a scenario in which this category doesn’t work. So I try to be as broad as possible in my racial categories, with the realization that no matter how hard I try, there will still be criticism as to how the races were labeled.

The Blogosphere as a whole: These are the results if you add all the niches together:

Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 73%
Black/African: 9%
Asian: 10%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 1%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%
Native American: 1%

Comics Blogs:

Male: 71%
Female: 29%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 85%
Black/African: 4%
Asian: 7%
Latino/Hispanic: 4%

Sex Blogs:

Male: 36%
Female: 64%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 100%

Gadget/Technology Blogs:

Male: 67%
Female: 33%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 29%
Asian: 43%
Latino/Hispanic: 28%

Gay/Homosexual Blogs:

Male: 94%
Female: 6%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 88%
Black/African: 6%
Asian: 6%

Movie/Film/Television Blogs:

Male: 81%
Female: 19%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 68%
Black/African: 8%
Asian: 12%
Latino/Hispanic: 12%

Sports Blogs:

Male: 86%
Female: 14%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 68%
Black/African: 5%
Asian: 27%

Law/Legal Blogs:

Male: 74%
Female: 26%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 94%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%

Music Blogs:

Male: 71%
Female: 29%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 80%
Black/African: 20%

Speculative Fiction (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror) Blogs:

Male: 72%
Female: 28%
***
Caucasian: 89%
Black/African: 2%
Asian: 9%

Gossip/Fashion Blogs:

Male: 29%
Female: 71%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 48%
Black/African: 30%
Asian: 9%
Latino/Hispanic: 9%
Native American: 4%

Liberal Political Blogs:

Male: 67%
Female: 33%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 84%
Black/African: 5%
Asian: 8%
Native American: 3%

Conservative Political Blogs:

Male: 79%
Female: 21%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 87%
Black/African: 4%
Asian: 2%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 2%
Latino/Hispanic: 3%
Native American: 2%

Regional/City/Location-oriented Blogs:

Male: 57%
Female: 43%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 86%
Asian: 14%

Military Blogs:

Male: 76%
Female: 24%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 100%

Feminist Blogs:

Male: 14%
Female: 86%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 50%
Black/African: 38%
Latino/Hispanic: 12%

Food Blogs:

Male: 24%
Female: 76%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 94%
Asian: 6%

Literary/Book Blogs:

Male: 65%
Female: 35%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 76%
Black/African: 6%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 12%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%

Poker Blogs:

Male: 86%
Female: 14%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 88%
Latino/Hispanic: 12%

Wine Blogs:

Male: 66%
Female: 34%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 100%

Science Blogs:

Male: 71%
Female: 29%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 88%
Black/African: 6%
Asian: 6%

Automotive/Car/Truck/Motorcycle Blogs:

Males: 90%
Females: 10%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 78%
Asian: 11%
Lation/Hispanic: 11%

Interesting Observations:

1. Many of the bloggers felt inclined to include their religion for the race question. For instance, there were a lot of Jewish bloggers, and in the US they would be considered a minority group. Perhaps I should have been more broad in my survey and asked which ethnic group a blogger belonged to.

2. There were a few bloggers who grew defensive about the race question. They would answer “American” or that they were part of “The Human Race.” One blogger posted my survey on his blog where it was ridiculed by several readers for exactly this reason.

3. Several bloggers noted that they didn’t really know much about the diversity of their niche because they couldn’t see the faces of most of the bloggers (excluding ones who include pics).

Conclusions:

1. You can compare the demographics of the blogosphere to the demographics of the US through the 2000 US Census (PDF). Please note however that a couple of the blogs included in my survey aren’t written by US citizens.

For gender:

Male: 49.1%
Female: 50.9%

For race (please note that the Census places Hispanics as Caucasian):

White: 75.1%
Black or African American: 12.3%
American Indian and Alaska Native: 0.9%
Asian: 3.6%

2. You can compare the demographics of computer owners who have access to internet to my results through this Census report (PDF). As you can see, there seems to be a correlation between those who have access to internet and those who have blogs. The chart shows that a higher percentage of Asians have access to internet than blacks, and this could be why more Asians blog despite the fact that they make up a smaller US percentage than blacks.

3. The only niches where females outnumbered males were Sex Blogs, Gossip/Fashion Blogs, Feminist Blogs, and Food Blogs.

4. White males make up the largest group within the blogosphere as a whole.

Flaws in the experiment: Oh, there are many. To list:

1. This was not a scientific poll, and should not be regarded as such. It gives a very rough idea about blogosphere diversity. It really all came down to who actually responded to the survey. In order for there to be a more accurate picture of the blogosphere, more studies by professional pollsters would have to be conducted.

2. As always with my Bloggasm Case Studies, I would have liked to have a larger sample.

3. This really only maps the diversity of niche bloggers. It doesn’t take into account the millions of livejournal, xanga, and myspace blogs out there. If I were to survey people who just keep a blog for personal journals, then the results might have turned out differently.

4. There are probably several more. I’d like people to write in with their criticisms of this study so that I can have a follow-up post in a few days that will publish some of the things you have to say. Please be civil in your emails. Remember that I didn’t do this study to personally offend anyone. You can send these emails to simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

The Blogosphere Speaks out: For my fourth question, I asked what the bloggers thought about diversity within their niche and in the blogosphere as a whole. Here’s a small sample of the responses I got:

1. John Scalzi: I assume the diversity of the blog world maps to the diversity of college-educated adults, since in my experience (and leaving aside MySpace and Facebook for the moment), college-educated adults are the people most likely to blog. Whether this is sufficient diversity is up to other people to argue about. I will say that given the current low barrier of entry to blogging (i.e., all you need is an internet connection), there’s no reason the blogosphere couldn’t be profoundly diverse.

2.Jeff Soyer:While most of the high profile bloggers are white males, it doesn’t take long to discover that there are huge quantities of bloggers of every interest, race, gender, religion, and political persuasion. There are whole groups of black bloggers, gay bloggers, tons of women bloggers. There are bloggers about every niche subject under the sun. The other day I wrote a short post about switching browsers, from Safari to Firefox. A blog dedicated to news about Macs gave a link and sent 400 readers my way! There are bloggers for pets, cooking, sci-fi, local state politics, travel, there was even one from a research scientist in Antarctica posting pictures every few days. There are homeless bloggers using the computers in libraries or cafes.

These days, almost everyone has access to a computer and with so many sites willing to host blogs for free, anyone can get their opinions onto the web. I consider the blogosphere to be the most democratic of institutions in that anyone can have a blog and — since most blogs accept comments — anyone can respond to blog posts. This is where Main Stream Media can never hope to compete because they have limited “letters to the editor” space as well as censoring rights. Needless to say, TV news opinions almost always go unanswered, too — except via the blogosphere.

3.Chuck Dupree: I’m starting from the viewpoint that everything I know about the web—and I’ve been using the internet since 1979; I was building SGML processing software in 1980—relates either to the US or to cyberspace in general. When we talk about how ‘representative the blogosphere is, that’s a relative term. I can only compare to what I know.

My other starting point is that I basically don’t give a crap about the non-political blogosphere. My guess is that no matter how you define the word, most of the blogosphere is not about politics and the related civic, social, religious, and literary issues I care about. Probably most definitions of “blogosphere” would assign a miniscule proportion to the political. I’m happy that people are finding this new communication medium useful for non-political purposes; but I don’t care about sewing or CB radio or teenage angst or other peoples’ videos of themselves, so I don’t visit those parts of the ‘sphere and I thus have little to no idea what they’re like. I’m only talking about the part I inhabit.

In that context, it seems to me that the blogosphere’s diversity leaves a lot to be desired.

The blogosphere is certainly more diverse with respect to political opinion than the mainstream media. In fact I’d claim that we represent the range of opinion in the US fairly well. I have no way to measure how representative bloggers outside the US are of their neighbors.

I think the blogosphere has made significant strides with respect to gender diversity in the last year or so. There are a lot more well-known female bloggers than there were when I started, which is obviously a fine thing. I think there are some male bloggers who did their bit by linking to and promoting the better blogs from women. But mostly I think that there aren’t as many female nerds as male nerds, and it wasn’t until people began to think of the internet as communication rather than computing that women got turned on by the possibilities. Now that everyone realizes it’s about communication, women have begun to take their rightful place in the medium.

As far as racial diversity goes, one of the cool things about the web is that you generally don’t know what race, religion, or gender your commentors and correspondents are. You take them on their ideas and their words. But to judge from the data one sees in the news, we need to do more to make sure that the worst off, who in the US are disproportionally black and Hispanic, have easy access to the internet. A society full of literate people is a better society for all except the top couple of percent. Our society is not currently set up to encourage movement up the economic ladder, but in my opinion it will either become more encouraging of such movement or it will face gradually increasing civil revolt.

In a society that allows people to move from the lower class to the middle, education is key; and for upcoming generations, understanding computers will be part of what it means to be literate. Thus we must make familiarity with the internet easy to gain for everyone. It’s possible that the Negroponte laptop will allow significant strides in this area. In any case it’s a worthy attempt, and if it fails we should try to figure out why and make an improved model. The goal is vital.

4. Pinko Feminist Hellcat: I think the blogosphere as a whole and feminist blogs in particular are pretty diverse. However, (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?) people still tend to link to and give credence to folks who ‘look’ like them. So, for example, you’ll see White feminists shutting down and shutting out women of color like Nubian, Shannon, and Brownfemipower. There is a lot of defensiveness about discussions about race, class, ablility, or sexuality. People tend to feel threatened when we’re called out on something, and a lot of us have the mistaken view that because we’re leftists or feminists or whatever, that we’re above all of that.

5. Greasy Guide: I think diversity for the blogosphere is good. But for the urban bloggers or bloggers who focus on Hip-Hop and Black Lifestyles it’s hard for us to make real money. While there are communities out there like Gawker…there is no organization which unites urban bloggers together and helps them make money or get access to items for stories. So while it’s good to see a huge number of sites that are diverse, we are not making the money that the mainstream blogs are.

6. Edward Champion: I think the literary blogosphere is a little different from other niches. There are a lot of women out there who blog. Laila Lalami and Tayari Jones are two bloggers (also accomplished writers in their own right) who often bring interesting cultural perspectives into their blogs, and I read them both every day.

The blogosphere as a whole, however, seems the province of mostly white males — particularly on the politics and technology side.

7. ADD: The blogosphere, and especially the comics blogosphere, seems diverse to me, but I seek out as many opinions and angles as I can in my quest for a better understanding of the artform of comics. While owning a computer and an internet connection are, I suppose, barriers to complete freedom to blog, once you’re online the only determining factor to getting your voice consistently heard is what you have to say, and how well you say it. I don’t personally care what race, gender or sexual orientation you are — if you have something to teach me, I am willing to listen. I’d like to think quality writing is the great equalizer: My favourite comics blogger of all time is gay, but it seems ridiculous to even say that. He’s just my favourite comics blogger of all time, and I’m glad he’s back.

8. Golden State of Mind (Atma Brother #1): Right now the hoops and more generally sports media is primarily dominated by white middle-aged men (the Bay Area being a welcome exception). The hoops blogosphere affords new opportunities for people that have been excluded from having a voice to share their unique perspectives. NBA blogs in particular are growing at a rapid pace and with that growth a diverse array of fresh ideas and thoughts from both people of color and women have emerged. Traditional hoops coverage better watch out! In a year or two the hoops blogosphere and subculture is really going to explode.

As for the blogosphere as a whole- there’s more flavors than Baskin Robbins could ever feature! The diversity and niche interests represented are impressive. You have to do a little work to find them, but there are blogs for anything you can imagine that connect to people at a very personal level. Are you a South Asian American who loves Bay Area hip hop, sports, and nerdy gadgets? There are exactly zero TV shows for you, but there’s tons of blogs just for you. Just poke around.

Current media giants have been incredibly slow to respect and fully understand diversity, mostly because they are often times so detached from the people they want to reach. Blogs on the other hand (not counting the fake corporate ones) are inherently community-based and are created for the people by the people.

9. Secret Simon: I can only speculate, but on the whole, blogging can be anything from a glorified personals ad to an introspective essay on the state of the universe and all shades in between. But since most have facets of reader interaction, even ones that are anonymously penned, blogs become a giant social network and include at least a diverse readership, if not participation.

Something I’ve observed in niches is that they tend to link each other sometimes exclusively, for instance, the gay bloggers tend to communicate and comment and read other gay bloggers, the art bloggers seek out other art blogs, mommy bloggers keep to their inner circle of fellow moms. Because of the shared interest and what they are comfortable with it’s hard to find an overlapping diversity because you run into the same people over and over. It’s there but doesn’t spread easily. People fall into their niche, just as they would seek out a social group, often times filling a void if that social group is physically unavailable.

It is pretty basic though, that people who read and write blogs must have access to the technology, and while that is pretty easy worldwide now, there is a section of Earth’s population that will always have no idea what a “blog” is. As such it tends to fall to the countries or communities with the personal computers and internet connection.

If I may add I’m more accustomed to seeking out personal, journal style blogs and rarely read bigger ones that are collective. Also while I am sure there are those whose intentions are less than honorable and one must be careful, I have not had any negative experience in the blogosphere with the those I have interacted with.

10. Cork and Demon: The blogosphere seems quite diverse to me, both in niche interests and gender/race. I have seen and read blogs by people of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and European decent, although I don’t recall having read one written by or about those of Hispanic descent. I see lots of blogs written by women, men, teenagers and younger kids.

As for the niche of food and wine, I see plenty of women writing food related blogs, particularly sharing recipes and at-home food experiences, many of whom have a particular subject, such as desserts, or even more specific, such as cupcakes. Women also review restaurants, offer tips on making beverages and wine pairings, and discuss the foodie culture.

The niche of wine talk is dominated by caucasian men, as far as I can see, with a range in age of about 25-60. There are a few women, including myself, but I have never felt that I am dismissed because of my gender in any way. I just think that the wineblogging community reflects the wine interest niche as a whole, and women have typically shyed away from it.

11. Green LA Girl: I have to agree with Gregory Dicum, who says many big green bloggers are highly educated males. So I do wish we had both more women and more people of color blogging on sustainability. Or more accurately, there ARE lots of women and people of color blogging about these issues, but their blogs tend not to be very popular as they tend to be more personal blogs from people who don’t already have a big name due to their affiliation with work or with an enviro org.

I guess I’m saying that the high percentage of white males heading up various big enviro orgs and businesses tends to translate into a high percentage of while males heading up big enviro blogs. This is hardly a situation that’s unique to the environmental movement, of course, but one that we environmentalists could keep working to address. On the upside, these highly educated male enviro bloggers I mentioned tend to be dudes that care deeply about environmental and social justice, so I’m optimistic that they too are concerned about issues of diversity.

12. Manhattan Offender: The honest answer is that I am so within my own niche that I don’t have a real awareness of other bloggers outside of the “gay” or “humor” genres. And while there may be diversity within those niches, for the most part, those I have encountered have been white, college educated people. Even within that niche I sort of stand out as having come from a blue-collar background and age-wise, I’m an “older” blogger.

I’ve tried to transcend the niche to a degree. Mine is one of the few sites of “GWM” bloggers that links to sites written in Spanish, Portuguese, and even Turkish. While it seems that many bloggers are out to find people of “like-mind”, I think I have enough of that in the “real” world. My experience with blogging has been to search out sites that have diverse viewpoints in politics and other perspectives. (The exception is religion. Religion is for suckers.)

There were predictions written years ago that as the diversity of available media increased, there would be an equivalent increase in partisanship or “niche-ism”. While these predictions have come true in the infant and toddler years of the internet, it would be my guess that readers will eventually grow bored of reading the same viewpoints within their niche. In time, we will part of the tools available for those reaching out for a diversity of viewpoints in order to formulate opinions of their own.

13. Freya’s House of Dreams: Diversity? As in the cultural or racial differences or overall diversity of race, class, gender, quality of perspective?

The first one would be hard to answer. It’s the internet, people can say they’re anything they want to be. So while someone might say they were an Asian woman but be an old white guy living in his mom’s basement in Philly. It seems that there are more white bloggers of middle class out there but I can’t say for sure. I’d wager it was true given the way class works in American culture (I don’t see a whole lot of blogs from other countries but that may be because I can’t read in other languages).

Who has computers? Who has enough spare time to blog? Single mothers working two jobs to pay the rent don’t have the time. Guys on swing shift trying to make the mortgage and keep the family eating and with health insurance don’t have the time. The blogsphere has a great scarcity of perspectives from blue collar/working class people.

As for the second issue – IMO this is also colored by the relative ease with which people can masquerade as just about anyone online. However, I don’t see a whole lot of blue collar sex blogs, nor do I see many sex blogs I’d consider to offer truly good writing or interesting perspectives. In that sense, most sex blogs are at best boring and homogenous and at worst, awful drek.

14. Sexoteric: Well, there’s both a lot of variety and a lot of duplication. There’s a lot of sex blogs that aren’t much more than spam. And there are many blogs that liberally borrow content from each other, mine included. Most interesting are probably the people who write candidly about their actual experiences. Much good stuff there, of high quality. The best are for some reason usually women, with a few exceptions. Overall, I think there’s a lot of diversity in the blogosphere.

… But, wait, you’re thinking about diversity as in male/female, black/white, aren’t you? Not diversity of content? I personally think that’s a very U.S. – centric way of looking at it. You know, diversity being that the ratio of bloggers who are African-American should be the same as in the general population, etc. I don’t particularly buy that, and personally think that’s a bit of a racist/sexist attitude, to try to force particular ratios. Some kind of collective guilt thing from Amerca’s relatively recent past as a slave-holding nation.

There is no lack of bloggers who’re in minorities, and I think blogging provides excellent opportunities for any groups that otherwise might find it difficult to have a voice. An excellent equalizer.

15. Ben Peek: I think in my particular niche, there are too many writers, and not enough readers. It seems to be that these days if you’re a struggling author you go out and grab yourself a blog to help with your writing ‘career’, whatever such a thing is. Granted, it’s exactly how I began in 2001, but I did it simply because I couldn’t be bothered to create a dead web space site. I wanted something fluid.

Also, the bloggers are very white. This is especially the case of the Australian speculative fiction scene, which is, of course, largely white. The age range begins in the early twenties and goes out somewhere in the early to mid forties, from what I can tell. I can only think of one blogger over the age of fifty in the Australian speculative fiction scene.

So, I think the diversity could stand to be amped up a bit in the niches I find myself part of, but it’s not exactly like you can force a blog into the hands of someone just to change that. Over all, however, I do find the blogsphere to be a fairly diverse and interesting place.

16. Terra Sigillata: I am quite pleased with the diversity in my part of the blogosphere, especially at ScienceBlogs.com. Diversity of class or stature: we have a great mix of people across the scientific career spectrum, with basic scientists and physicians, as well as graduate students and fellows. Diversity of gender: we are almost 50/50 men and women, and the women are among the most reflective and constructive of the writers, raising the most critical questions and encouraging debate. Diversity of race: we could do better. We have a few brown-skinned folks, Bangledeshi, and “general” African-American, a few Asian-Americans (including one Canadian). I think that we could use some women of color and Hispanic-Americans of either sex.

In general, outside of ScienceBlogs.com, I am pleased to see so many feminist bloggers and female scientists, especially since one of my real-life career interests is increasing the number of women in science and medicine. Outside of blogging, medicine has done particularly well, although we have yet to see women significantly breaking into the upper eschelon of academic medicine administration (Donna Shalala as president of the Univ of Miami, notwithstanding). I was also tickled to see this year’s Lasker Award winners include two visionaries for their work on telomerase, Elizabeth Blackburn and her former student and now Hopkins professor, Carol Greider. The blogosphere clearly reflects this trend toward women helping women, even if it is not always present in academic science and medicine. I also see many mid-career men like me who blog are learning more about the real problems facing women in science and medicine that we may not necessarily hear in our daily academic lives. My hope is that the community that has developed in the blogosphere will come back and renew the sense of community and mentoring that seems to have been lost in the highly competitive real-world academic environment.

***

Did you enjoy this article? Go ahead and digg it

An example of the exaggerated prediction:

So while we can look at that worth calculator with some hopeful amusement, I don’t think very many people think that their blog is actually worth that much.

Because of this, I set out to statistically find a formula for predicting a blog’s worth, so somebody that is thinking about buying a blog can use it to estimate how much money he or she should spend buying out the blog. Please note that this only predicts the worth of the blog itself, not the blogger as well if you’re planning on bringing him/her on board.

Methods of experimentation: Obviously, I could only use blogs that had transparent advertising methods for my study. What this means is that they had to use an advertising program which allows anybody to view how much money they are making per week. The main two programs that do this are 1.Blogads: a combination of picture and text advertising that allows you to place an ad for a given amount of time for a set rate, and 2. Adbrite: a link-text advertising program that allows you to place a text ad for a given amount of time for a set rate.

For each of these programs, you know exactly how many people are advertising and how much they are paying for those ads.

Now, many people will point out that people who use Blogads and Adbrite also have alternate forms of advertising on their site, usually Google adsense or some kind of affiliate program. To compensate for this possibility, I used this rationale: Blogads, in return for its services, takes out 1/3 of your income for themselves, which means that the blogger only gets 2/3s of the listed price. With Adbrite, they take out 1/4. Also, if you only advertise for a week, you’re buying a much more expensive ad than if you were to buy a bulk package of 2 weeks or more. So by not subtracting these amounts out and going only by the one-week ad rate, I’m attempting to compensate for what the blogger is making through other advertising programs.

When trying to figure out how much any company is worth, many people will tell you that you should spend as much as that blog/company will make in an entire year. So to figure out a blog’s worth, I merely took those weekly rates and multiplied them by 52.

I surveyed 100 blogs that use transparent advertising programs, and divided each blog into a niche. I was somewhat broad with the niches. They are as follows:

1. Political/military/legal/feminist
2. Gossip/movie/television
3. Gadget/technology/software/”nerd”
4. Regional/city/location-oriented
5. Literature/books/art/poetry/publishing
6. Sports/gaming/outdoor-activities
7. miscellaneous/ non-niche
After figuring out each blog’s yearly worth and then placing it in a niche, I then used Technorati to find out how many blogs were linking to each blog. For those who don’t know, Technorati, in its ranking system, only counts the number of blogs that have linked to you in the past 6 months when calculating your rank. So for instance, you can see that Bloggasm has 115 blogs linking to it as of this posting. There has been a lot more than just 115 blogs linking to us, but that’s the number that has linked to us in the past 6 months, and so that’s the number I used when I calculated the money-per-link worth.

After I knew how many blogs were linking to a particular blog, I divided that number into the amount that blogs makes in a year (aka, its total worth), and by doing this, I was able to tell how much each link is worth and devise a formula for calculating a blog’s worth within its niche.

After all this was done, I averaged all the amounts together in each niche, so that you can use the forumula below to calculate a particular blog’s worth:

1. If your blog is a miscellaneous blog that doesn’t adhere to a specific niche (example: BoingBoing), take the number of blogs linking to you and multiply by $21.57 to figure out your blog’s worth.

2. If your blog is a Political/military/legal/feminist blog take the number of blogs linking to you and multiply by $27.64.

3. If your blog is a Gossip/movie/television blog, take the number of blogs linking to you and multiply by $52.58.

4. If your blog is a Gadget/technology/software/”nerd” blog, take the number of blogs linking to you and multiply by $34.89.

5. If your blog is a Regional/city/location-oriented blog, take the number of blogs linking to you and multiply by $51.70

6. If your blog is a Literature/books/art/poetry/publishing-industry blog, take the number of blogs linking to you and multiply by $13.75.

7. If your blog is a Sports/gaming/outdoor-activities blog, take the number of blogs linking to you and multiply by $46.80

Interesting observations: 1. As the number of links to a blog went down, so did each individual link’s worth. So if you have a blog with 100 people linking to you, each of those individual links is worth less than a blog who has 200 blogs linking to it.

2. The blogger who was #1 in his/her niche had a VASTLY higher money-per-link ratio. The #1 bloggers always outperformed the #2 and #3 blogs in their niches by much more than I expected.

3. There were a surprising number of blogs who only used Blogads as their single source of income. I can understand that adsense doesn’t pay very well in some niches, but I still think that a lot of these blogs could have brought in a significant amount of extra income to their blogs by including it.

Results in action: For fun, I’m going to take some random blogs and calculate how much they’re worth. Here we go:

Whatever is worth $20,750, Guy Kawasaki is worth $151,387, Gladwell is worth $27,221, POD-dy Mouth is worth $2337, Infothought is worth $9804, Unclaimed Territory is worth $74,932, Fosfor Gadgets is worth $42,180, Cinematech is worth $8,833, Organizing LA is worth $1912, CrimLaw is worth $2128, War Liberal is worth $864, Bookdwarf is worth $1038, Feministing is worth $42,012, Cinecultist is worth $7150, Professor Bainbridge is worth $27,363, Yet another comics blog is worth $1072, Basketbawful is worth $18,579, Got Gay? is worth $3154, Open Book is worth $7493, Sports Law Blog is worth $8704, Valleywag is worth $75,327, PSP Hacks is worth $9036, The Movie Blog is worth $50,108, The ADD blog is worth $563, Is That Legal? is worth $6,965, Wordyard is worth $1722, LA voice is worth $14,837, Screenhead is worth $43,168, Pajiba is worth $26,973, Dispatches from the culture wars is worth $18,337, Cinematical is worth $130,661, The Blog Herald is worth $54,334, Norwegianity is worth $9,936, Queerty is worth $47,778, The Mumpsimus is worth $2,791

Conclusions: 1. It’s still very hard for a person to make a full time living off of a single blog.

2. Blogs which don’t fall into any sort of niche are at a serious disadvatage. This probably owes to the fact that it’s far easier for niche blogs to find niche advertisers.

3. Gossip blogs, gadget blogs, and regional blogs have great advertising potential.

4. I’m surprised at this, but Lit Blogs aren’t pulling in a lot of money yet.

5. If you have fewer than a hundred people linking to you, your blog probably isn’t worth anything yet from a buyer’s standpoint.

Flaws in my experiment: 1. Obviously, even though I try to compensate for the ad programs other than Blogads and Adbrite, I probably didn’t even come close in some instances. From reports I’ve read, gadget blogs make a ton of money off adsense, so most gadget blogs are actually worth a lot more than I predicted. Though I think if we want to avoid another dot com bubble, we should be conservative in our estimates, so perhaps my estimate isn’t that bad of a starting point.

2. Some niches just don’t work well with Blogads or Adbrite. For some, text/based advertising is the way to go. For others, it’s image-based advertising.

3. There are some niches that only use Affiliate marketing, like poker blogs and sex blogs, and from what I’ve read, they can make a good living.

4. I would need a bigger band of blogs to get a more accurate study. For some niches, there weren’t very many blogs that used transparent advertising programs.

Criticism: Now, I have a feeling that this case study is going to get a lot of criticism from bloggers. You can place this criticism in the comments section or email me at Simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Just remember, if I got my math wrong, I didn’t do it out of some kind of hatred towards anyone, or any kind of malicious intent. So please be civil while you’re criticizing my work. If I get enough intelligent emails regarding this, I’ll have a follow-up post with them so people can hear your feedback.

Thanks for tuning in to this weeks Bloggasm Case study, come back next Friday for our next one.

So what would other blog search engines need to do so that bloggers can have a viable alternative if they don’t want to stick with Technorati?

1. Create a ranking system. I’d say that a lot of Technorati’s searchers are mostly bloggers who are ego searchers. Almost every time I put a link up to a blogger, within 24 hours he or she visits my blog through a Technorati ego search. Obviously, a lot of bloggers, myself included, like to check in on their ranking every day to see if they’ve improved at all.

2. Have a profile-creating system. This allows all your blogs to show under your name within Technorati, and makes it easy for you to find other blogs that have the same writers, since a lot of bloggers have multiple blogs.

3. Create a tag way of searching. A lot of people search by tag rather than just by word-choice.

4. Have blog highlights and display top blog posts. Allows one to see what’s hot in the blogosphere.

5. List “most-searched” items. A lot of people are curious as to what other people are searching for, there’s been lots of times where I’ve seen an odd word on the most-searched list, clicked into it, and was immediately glad I did.

I think if other blog search engines put in these things, especially the blog ranking system, then people would feel more comfortable switching over from Technorati. But for now, most of the blog search engines just allow simple search, and without a good way yet of categorizing the blog posts like Google’s Page Rank system, simple searches mostly give way only to splogs.

UPDATE: looks like it’s working again.

Related posts: How much money is your blog really worth? A Bloggasm case study, Woman sues Google after being banned from Adsense

Hello. You recently posted an ad in the “Casual Encounters” section in Craigslist. We would appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes of your time to answer a few questions. This is part of a preliminary study in an Illinois University. These initial statistics will not be used in the study, but will help orient and define it. All answers are strictly secret and confidential and will be discarded.

Thank you for your time

Instructions: you don’t need to copy the questions, just write the question
number and the answer:

1) I am a :
Woman Man Transvestite

2) I am posting as a:
Woman Man Transvestite

3) My age is:

4) The age I declared was:

5) I am:
Homosexual Heterosexual Bisexual

6) My race is:

7) I posted with:
A real picture a fake picture a real but older than 5 years
picture no picture

I got approximately this number of responses:
0 1-5 5-20 20-50 more than 50

9) the result was:
Nothing I used the answers for sexual self gratification I met
with somebody I met with somebody and had a sexual encounter

10) I obtained what I wanted
yes no

11) Brief description of your ad

12) Any additional comments (highly appreciated)

Methods of experimentation: I picked three cities: New York, Chicago, and Houston, and posted ads to each city, using different email addresses for each ad. For each city I posted four ads: One pretending to be a straight female looking for sex with a male, another one as a straight male looking for sex with a female, another as a bicurious male looking for sex with another male, and one as a bisexual female looking for sex with another female. I said basically the same thing in each ad and didn’t include a pic or much personal information, except that I had just moved into the city. I then sat back and let the emails build up in the inbox, and then went through every single one to assess the results, which are as follows.

Results: Here are the stats on how many people responded to each person.

New York:

Straight female looking to have sex with a male: 165 responses

Straight male looking to have sex with a female: 0 responses

Bi-curious male looking to have sex with a male: 9 responses

Bisexual female looking to have sex with a female: 2 responses

Chicago:

Straight female looking to have sex with a male: 200 responses

Straight male looking to have sex with a female: 0 responses

Bi-curious male looking to have sex with a male: 6 responses

Bisexual female looking to have sex with a female: 2 responses

Houston:

Straight female looking to have sex with a male: 54 responses

Straight male looking to have sex with a female: 1 response

Bi-curious male looking to have sex with a male: 10 responses

Bisexual female looking to have sex with a female: 1 response

Interesting observations:

1. For the New York and Chicago postings where I pretended to be a straight female looking for a male, I had over twenty emails after only three or four minutes of posting. The rate of emails slowed down as the day went on when the post got pushed further and further down on the page.

2. I was overwhelmed with how many straight males simply included pictures of their penises and nothing else. Were they really expecting that a girl would see a picture of their penis and exclaim “That’s the guy for me!”?

3. Some men wrote really short, one-lined notes, while others gave entire biographies of themselves. One guy included a 2,000-word erotica short story to “get [her] in the mood.”

4. Many men included their full name and face pics, and it wasn’t hard to find most of them using Google.

5. Two of the men who responded were aides to Congressmen and bragged about it in their emails. Other people told me their professions.

6. Several men admitted that they were married or in a relationship and were looking to cheat on their significant others.

7. Home phone numbers were often included in the emails.

8. Some men tried to impress the girl with how witty they were, I guess as an attempt to stand out in the crowd.

9. If you haven’t gotten the point yet, most of the people gave away an ungodly amount of personal info away to an anonymous person on the internet.

10. The post from the straight male looking for a female got spammed the most by people trying to advertise their dating websites and webcams.

11. Many of the people who answered the ad for the bi-curious man claimed to be straight, which means that a lot of bi-curious males are surfing through craigslist to have their first experiences.

12. Most the responders were between twenty and forty years-old.

Conclusions/advice:

1.The first thing that always came to my mind was the fact that if a really malicious person wanted to get on craigslist and ruin a lot of people’s lives, he easily could. I had so much personal information and so many pictures of so many people, that I could have posted their names and pictures alongside their messages online somewhere and have their most treasured secrets available to anyone who google searched their names.

2. It’s almost impossible for a straight male to find anonymous sex through craigslist. At least when he has a post that doesn’t include his picture. Out of all the ads put out by straight males, there was only one woman who responded. Also, whenever you respond to a female’s ad, you are normally competing with anywhere from 100 to 200 other males.

3. Lesbian/bi females, gay/bi males, and straight females should have no problem getting laid through craigslist.

4. My advice for straight males is to perhaps try answering ads in other personal sections, including the “friends-only” section and the “relationship” section. Many of the female ads there indicated they were only interested in light dating, not a serious relationship, so my guess is that a few of those people could lead to some casual sex after a date or two. This based purely on speculation. But as a side experiment, I filled out a few ads pretending to be a straight female inside the “dating” section, and they got far fewer responders than in the “no strings attached section,” meaning a lot less competition. In my limited experience, girls are just as horny as men, they’re just less likely to meet anonymously some stranger they’ve never met so they can have sex.

5. Or here’s even better advice for straight males: don’t get laid through craigslist. I’m all for the internet and the doors it opens, but c’mon, guys have managed to get laid for thousands of years, and so have our evolutionary ancestors. It won’t kill you to actually put some effort into the task at hand and actually meet people on your own. There were times when I really felt ashamed to be a straight male. I mean, I can understand the allure of the whole thing, but there’s nothing like staring at 200 emails from horny men that allows you to understand how dismal the male gender really is. This must be why so many males think that honking your horn at a lady while you’re flying by her at thirty miles an hour is a legitimate way of hitting on her.

Flaws in my experiment:

1. This experiment didn’t really measure how hard it is to get laid through craigslist, only how hard it is to get people to respond to you. Getting them to meet you is probably another battle on its own.

2. I didn’t exactly create a representative sample: Houston, Chicago, and New York. All three are major cities, and the results might have been slightly different if I’d posted in less-crowded areas from different parts of the country. But I only gave myself a week to put this together, and between creating all the different email addresses, and then all the different personal ads, and then collecting and sifting through all the data, it was very time consuming and I only had time for three cities.

Final notes: Thanks to everyone who unknowingly participated. I’m sorry that I wasn’t the person who I pretended to be and you were a guinea pig for my experiment. If anything, hopefully you’re now more aware of the situation and can use the results from this experiment to increase your chances of getting laid through craigslist. Be sure to tune in next Friday for a new Bloggasm case study.

UPDATE: This post got a lot of reader feedback, which I posted over here

ANOTHER UPDATE: In the past few days, several journalists have contacted me asking for interviews, for both my Craigslist experiment and my post on facebook’s controversy. If you’d like an interview, contact me at Simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

We can set up either a phone or email interview through there.