How do you square the finding that the blog audience is not "statistically meaningful" with all the big media attention being showered on us? I think stuff like this has got a lot to do with it. Unlike blogging, Google truly is a mass phenomenon. And if it's true that blogs figure prominently (and inordinately so) in Google search results, that could explain how millions are aware of blogging without necessarily being devoted readers.

How big is the Blogiverse, or at least the political end of it? My casual guess would be that about 100,000 people read current-events blogs on a daily or semi-daily basis. This guess is derived largely from Instapundit's traffic logs. Take his Extreme Traffic counter (which I trust more than Site Meter's), which shows him consistently logging about 50,000 "unique visitors" an average day (and unique doesn't mean a unique person, but merely all the times a page has been called up not as the result of a reload). Conservatively speaking, this probably represents at most 25,000 or 30,000 actual souls, owing to all the people who'll check in multiple times a day because of Glenn's high-update frequency. (As an obligatory note, I did get an inside view of this when he hotlinked one of my images and I observed a 3:1 daily ratio between loads and unique IP addresses viewing the file; that ratio is necessarily lower on this site because I don't post as frequently.)

We also know that Instapundit and a few others so thoroughly dominate the medium traffic-wise that it's only fair to assume that the vast majority of blog readers are content to read their sites alone or use them as launching pads to venture into smaller blogs. To get a sense of what 30,000 daily readers means, consider that only an elite handful of blogs — probably less than a dozen — crack 5,000 uniques a day. By contrast, I'd venture that there are comparatively few users who read blogs like mine but who don't read Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan, so traffic on the big blogs is a pretty good proxy for the overall blog audience.

Now, extrapolate the 30,000 daily uniques figure I've come up with to 50,000 who check in at least once or twice a week. For the sake of argument, assume there's another Instapundit-sized universe out there that rarely ever uses Reynolds' site but are nonetheless avid blog fans. This would get you to 100,000.

Obviously, that humbling number is a pretty far cry from the glossy magazine spreads, the Google deals, and the PBS specials. But is it as insignificant as it seems? Hardly. Blogging's comparative advantage is that it does attract for its readership a fair percentage of influentials, technorati, and other miscellaneous type-A early adopter types. Your average political magazine gets about 75,000 subscribers, and their effect on the policy zeitgeist is not insignificant. Blogs gain further notoriety from Google searches and articles like this, to the point where I'd guess that there are 2 or 3 million people who are casually aware of the phenomenon or track it for professional use without ever really immersing themselves in it.