Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank today. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago.

The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows. Surprisingly, this off-site link sharing has also extended the lifespan of content.

Highlights from the report include the following:

• Total reader engagement has grown 30% year over year or 69% total for the top 1,000 feeds, which includes blogs and mainstream news sites.

For 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each of 2007, 2008 and 2009...

Engagement on-site has grown in absolute terms but the share of total engagment that happens on-site vs. off-site has dropped 50%.

Trackbacks have fallen from 19% of engagement to 3% of engagement.

Engagement on social networks like but not limited to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook has grown from 1% to over 29% of total engagement. The Postrank staff admitted that this was a surprisingly low number but said that in aggregate there is still a whole lot of activity going on outside social networks.

Segmenting from the last amount of effort required up to the most, reader engagement now looks like this: 29% is link-sharing on social networks, 29% is bookmarking or voting on sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, 38.5% is comments on or off-site and trackbacks are now 3% of engagement. "Trackbacks are taking a nose dive," Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik told us by phone, "bookmarking sites have consistently gone down over the last 3 years, but voting on sites like Digg or Reddit has grown."

Perhaps most significantly, blog posts now have a longer life span. In 2007 tracked posts saw 94% of engagement within the first day and 98% of that first day's engagement happened within the first hour. In 2008 that number fell to 83% within the first day and in 2009 it was a mere 64%. Thus Postrank concludes that 36% of reader engagement in the top blogs happens after 1 day. "While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency," Grigorik says, "the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It's so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches - this trend is helping content travel further."

Its too bad Technorati stopped publishing information about Blogs and related statistics in their "State of the Blogosphere reports", but the information and stats from Post Rank are also quite good!

Broadband growth in the U.S. has slowed considerably in the last two years and future growth for online access technologies will come less from people adopting broadband for the first time and more from people upgrading from one technology to another, according to a report out today from Forrester. In addition to new technologies, Americans will also see speed boosts — even those on the slower service tiers — as providers attempt to offer more value on the low end rather than lower prices.

For many, the elimination of the 768 kbps or 1.5 Mbps connection options will go unnoticed, but for those that really only use email, a price decrease for barely broadband speeds will be welcome indeed — it could even spur a few laggards holding out on broadband because of pricing to step up. However, the big takeaway of the report is that most of the U.S. — at 80.9 million homes — has some access to broadband, and that such access will continue to improve.

When it comes to ISPs, subscriber growth will only help drive sales through the next two years; after that, revenue growth will have to come from new technologies, services and pricing schemes. Cable companies so far are winning, with 45 percent of homes expected to be subscribing to cable broadband by the end of 2009, but fiber to the home will make the most gains over the next five years, by which time it’s projected to grow to account for 10 percent of all access technologies from just 4 percent. And during that time, alternative wireless technologies aren’t forecast to be competitive to cable, fiber or even DSL.

While the speed boosts are welcome, I think the report needs to spend more time discussing how to make broadband access a differentiated service, beyond price and bundles. It recommends that providers focus their competitive strategies less on a bundle and more on  access to online storage, TV Everywhere and in-home entertainment that require higher speeds, and help keep subscribers from switching. The irony, of course, is that such high-bandwidth applications are apparently the same ones leading providers to cry uncle under an onslaught of heavy usage.

In a press release issued today, comScore breaks down the time spent online globally by properties, with Microsoft sites leading the way with nearly 15 percent of all time spent online (out of some 27 billion hours per month!):

comscoretimeonlineHowever in an interesting little sidelight, comScore reveals that “Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger representing nearly 70 percent of time spent on the property during the month”:

In September 2009, nearly 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet globally by a record online population of 1.2 billion Internet users age 15 and older. Microsoft Sites accounted for 14.5 percent of total minutes spent online in September, making it the most engaging global property, with Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger representing nearly 70 percent of time spent on the property during the month. Google Sites captured 9.3 percent of total minutes (2.5 billion hours), with YouTube accounting for nearly half of total time spent (1.2 billion hours) at the property. Yahoo! Sites ranked as the third most engaging Web property at 1.7 billion hours, followed by Facebook.com at 1.4 billion hours. Facebook’s share of attention reached 5.1 percent in September, an increase of 2.9 percentage points from the previous year, as its continued growth in popularity precipitated this surge in share.

So a little quick math, and 70% of 3,92 billion gives Windows Live Messenger some 2,744 billion hours of time spent online worldwide in a month: that’s more than all time spend online on Google, or Yahoo, or Facebook sites, wow!

For those of us in the US this may come as quite a surprise, as Messenger is not quite as popular as it is elsewhere, but looking at the comScore breakdown of numbers by region you can see where Microsoft (and Messenger) are most popular:

Agencies Report Big Jump in Search Spending in the Third Quarter

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The search advertising market is coming back, and Microsoft's Bing is slowly gaining share of search-ad dollars.

With Google's third-quarter earnings announcement coming Thursday, two digital agencies released aggregate client search-spending data from the third quarter.

The takeaway: Search spending among U.S. marketers is on the rise, gaining from the second quarter and getting close to matching spending levels of a year ago after several quarters of decline.

Search spending was up 10% from the second quarter among SearchIgnite clients, which includes Office Depot, Avis and E-Trade, and up 5% at Efficient Frontier, whose clients include Bankrate, BabyCenter.com and CapitalOne.

That and the $100 million Microsoft put into marketing Bing has started to bear fruit. Previously released reports from Hitwise and ComScore have shown traffic gains for Bing, but the new agency reports say ad spending is also up.

SearchIgnite has spending on Bing up 15% from the same period last year and Efficient Frontier said spending on the search engine is up 20%. Even with those gains, however, it is still a niche player. Bing accounted for 6% of all search spending in the third quarter, according to SearchIgnite, and 5.32% according to Efficient Frontier.

Google and Yahoo accounted for 77% and 17%, respectively, of spending among SearchIgnite clients, and 74% and 21% among Efficient Frontier clients.

"Marketers spend where they make money -- they are agnostic to Google or Yahoo or Bing," said said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite, which manages $350 million in search advertising a year.

Paid search advertising is the most immediate indicator of marketing spending because is bought in near real-time, compared with display advertising campaigns, which are planned months in advance. In addition to SearchIgnite and Efficient Frontier, Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney wrote that Performics and Covario were also anticipating about 10% growth in search spending over the second quarter.

Among SearchIgnite clients, the quarter to quarter jump is the biggest in two years, Mr. Barnette said.

"It's the most fluid form of online media with the least amount of planning so it's probably the most accurate marketing bellwether for the overall consumer," he said.

U.S. visits to social networking sites have increased 62 percent year over year;
visits from 55 and older age group have increased 77 percent

New York, N.Y., Oct. 9, 2009 - Experian^® Hitwise^® announced today that Facebook accounted for 58.59 percent of all U.S. visits among a custom category of 155 social networking Web sites in September 2009. The 58 percent was the highest among all social networking sites sites, as U.S. visits to Facebook increased 194 percent in September 2009 compared with September 2008. MySpace received the second-highest market share of U.S. visits for the month, with 30 percent.

Tagged received 2.38 percent of visits in September 2009, the third-largest amount. Twitter had the largest percentage gain in market share of visits among the top five visited Web sites, increasing 1170 percent compared with September 2008. U.S. visits to social networking Web sites increased 62 percent in September 2009 versus September 2008 among the custom category of 155 of the leading social networking sites.

MySpace tops in average time spent
MySpace had the highest average time spent among the top five most visited social networking Web sites, with 25 minutes and 56 seconds - representing a decrease of 12 percent compared with September 2008 Facebook experienced the largest growth in average time spent among the top five sites, increasing 23 percent in September 2009 to 23 minutes. Tagged saw an increase of 8 percent in time spent on its sites. Overall time spent on social networking Web sites decreased 20 percent in September 2009 versus September 2008.

Older users continue showing up on Facebook and social networking sites
Looking at the demographic breakdown of visitors to MySpace and Facebook, users between the ages of 18 and 34 still lead, as 32.27 percent and 26.96 percent of U.S. visits, respectively, came from those combined age groups in September 2009. This represents a 13 percent decline for MySpace and a 10 percent increase for Facebook in terms of year-over-year percentages. For Facebook, visitors who are 55 and older increased 108 percent in September 2009 compared with September 2008, while visitors from that age group to MySpace have increased 26 percent.

Overall U.S. visits to social networking Web sites from users who are 55 and older have increased 77 percent year over year. Visits from users 18 to 24 to social networking sites have decreased 33 percent year over year.

Given the growth of the Social networking platforms, its a good idea to put your efforts in building your brand on the most popular ones and that's where these stats would help you make the right choice.

U.S. web users tripled the amount of time they spent on social networks in August from the same month last year, according to Nielsen. And advertisers took note — estimated online advertising spending on social networks more than doubled over the same period.

Around 17 percent of all time spent on the web in August in the U.S. was on social networks, up from 6 percent during the same period a year ago, suggesting that sites like Twitter and Facebook have not only grown their audience size, but augmented user engagement. Meanwhile, advertising on social networks rose to $108 million last month from $49 million in August of 2008, an increase of 119 percent.

In the meantime, Facebook’s sale of self-serve ads has helped the social network become cash-flow positive, something to which Twitter — which doesn’t generate any significant revenue despite now being valued at $1 billion — may want to pay attention. A report from research firm Interpret found that Twitter users are twice as likely to click on advertisements or sponsors than people who belong to MySpace and Facebook. But while the San Francisco-based micromessaging site recently changed its terms of service to allow advertising, co-founder Biz Stone said earlier this week that Twitter won’t put ads on the site this year.

Fantastic post from GigaOM about the exponential growth of Time Spent on Social Networks!

Interesting Map about which side of the Road do people drive in various Countries!