A new Gallup poll finds that blog readership bogged down in 2005, showing growth in U.S. blog readers to be somewhere between nil and negative between February and December 2005. In fact, the percentage of Internet users who say they never read blogs rose during the period, from 63 percent to 66 percent. “The main inference is that blog readership did not grow during 2005,” the survey said.
No surprise, the survey shows a generation gap in blog readership. One in five Web users under age 30 say they read blogs frequently, while fewer than 1 in 10 older Americans do.
The survey says it is not just blog readership that suffers anemic growth — Americans’ likelihood of doing most other online activities also has not changed much over the past two years.