With the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, 2023 either feels like the worst or the best time to get into blogging. Is there a point to it if everyone gets their answer from a generative search?
But some people are blogging more than ever with AI, while others are wary of the tools or don’t think they are beneficial for the long term. And so, the way bloggers produce content has changed a lot in 2023.
The blogging statistics for 2023 can be instrumental in developing content strategies and getting insights into what’s working for others. You will also know if blogging would be worth it, especially if you are an affiliate blogger.
Blogging Key Statistics 2023 -2024
Source: Statista
22% of bloggers in the US publish a blog post weekly. 23% post several times per month. Meanwhile, only 2% post a blog per day.
Regardless of the frequency of blog posts, 97% of bloggers use WordPress. Of these, 71% are in English. A mere 4.7% is in Spanish, 2.4% in Indonesian, and 2.3% in Portuguese. Dutch, Turkish, and Italian also have entries in the top 10 at 0.6%, 0.7%, and 1%.
Yet, WordPress is capable of supporting over 120 languages. It’s expected English would win by far, as it is spoken by 1.45 billion people, even if it is the first language of only 380 million.
But the second most spoken language in the world, Mandarin Chinese at 1.138 billion, doesn’t get a feature in the top 10. However, this could be because China has its own microblogging platforms like Weibo, which are rarely calculated.
Even with the domination of English on WordPress, the CMS still publishes 70 million new posts every month. The hosted blogs also receive 77 million comments per month.
- 43.1% of all websites in the world are hosted in WordPress.
- More than 409 million people look at over 20 billion WordPress pages every month.
- If an article has an image every 75 to 100 words, it gets double the share of an article without or fewer images.
- Only 20% of the websites hosted on WordPress are blogs.
Small blogs receive an average of 3764 monthly views. 48% of it is from organic search. 18.51% is from direct traffic, 12.71% from referrals, 3.48% from email, and 1.96% from social.
This proves two things. New, small blogs can rely on search alone to generate almost half of their traffic. Second, more views come from repeated visitors, over referrals and socials.
Additionally, blogs with more than 1 million views get 87% of their traffic from searches. But if you have a small blog, how many blogs are you competing with?
How many blogs are there?
According to Siteefy, there are 1.11 billion websites in the world as of February 2023. However, only 199 million of these websites are running, while 82% are inactive.
Up until 2021, 600 million of 1.9 billion websites were blogs, both active and inactive. This means more than 1/3rd of the websites on the internet are blogs. If we go by this growth rate, there will be around 916 million blogs in 2023.
However, these are ambitious numbers, as these include inactive blogs. Additionally, because websites increased at a CAGR of 23.7% each year does not mean it will be the same for blogs.
Plus, if we take the inactivity rate to be the same for blogs, only about 162 million blogs are close to active. Plus, while all blogs are websites, not all websites are blogs.
Even so, 6 million blog posts are published per day, leading to a count of 2.5 billion blog posts annually. This also means 42 million blog posts are published per week and over 180 million blog posts go live per month. Yet, only 1% of bloggers post more than once per day.
In other words, more new blogs sprout every day than new blog posts are published by old websites.
This does leave us with a question. How many bloggers are there?
If we go by US numbers, there were at least 31.7 million bloggers in the country up until 2020. If we go by general growth, bloggers increase in the US by around 1 million every year. In 2023, there are likely over 34 million bloggers in the US.
Source: Statista
However, it’s impossible to quantify the number of bloggers worldwide or even in the US. Your definition of a blogger could be different from the researchers or even those who identify as a blogger. Moreso as microblogging and social media blogging have become common.
Microblogging Statistics 2023-2024
Twitter and Tumblr have monthly users of 368 million and 135 million. These are both microblogging sites, along with Mastodon, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Sina Weibo, China’s biggest microblogging platform, has 356.6 million monthly active users. A new competition in the microblogging space in 2023 has been Threads, which had 9.6 million active users as of August 2023, despite signing 100 million users in its first week of launch.
Source: Statista
Conversely, a platform like Tumblr had over 496 million blog accounts as of 2020 despite having a lower number of monthly active users. It accounts for 1% of websites used in the US. Yet, Tumblr remains the go-to platform for discussion on movies, TV shows, and music.
69% of Tumblr users are millennials, with a daily average session of 10 minutes and 25 seconds. And so, Tumblr’s ability to hold attention is actually bigger than many social media giants once it has your loyalty.
Yet, Zippia estimates the website generates a revenue of $84 million per year. Indeed, Tumblr blogs are more passion projects than an attempt to generate revenue for most users. Users don’t blog on the platform to promote their products but to have genuine fandom-related discussions.
Twitter’s form of microblogging focuses more on news, sports, and music. Twitter actually drives 9% of web traffic referrals. Considering the low number of active Twitter users worldwide, this shows significant engagement.
In total, 15% of internet users from the age of 16 to 64 research brands through microblogging platforms. Of them, 13.8% trust videos while doing their research. This indicates video blogging has a big future across all social platforms.
Blog Readership Statistics 2023-2024
Up until 2017, 77% of internet users read blogs. But a lot has changed in the last 6 years. According to Hubspot, 40% of total respondents have never read a blog post. But this means 60% of consumers have.
In particular, 325 people were surveyed on their reading habits. 29% read a blog post 1 to 4 times per month. 18% read a blog daily, while another 16% read up to 1 to 3 times per week. 6% read more than once per day, and 14% read blogs up to 4 to 6 times per week.
Only 17% said they don’t read blogs at all.
But the respondents for HubSpot surveys are likely content marketers and business owners. Their preference towards blog posts would be stronger than general internet users.
It’s still a pleasant indication of blog readership. 57% said they were reading the same amount of blogs the previous year too, while 35% have become more interested in blogs. Only 9% have decreased their consumption level.
And so, no amount of social media distractions have taken people away from traditional blogs.
But, one of the big facts about blogging is that readers skim. 35% admit to skimming on all their reads, meaning they only focus on the headline, bullet points, and images.
38% do a mixture of deep reading and skimming. 13% deep read, and 8% read the part they care about the most but glance over the rest of the blog, too. About 6% exit the page after they get the most vital point.
So, blogging isn’t futile, but on average, readers only spend 52 seconds on a blog post, according to Klipfolio. This explains why 36% of readers go for list-based blogs. It’s easier to get all the data while spending minimum time on the blog.
In fact, a HubSpot survey reveals 33% of readers learn something new from a blog post, and it’s their main reason for reading. 20% use blogs as entertainment, and 12% use blogs to stay up to date with their industry.
Which is why only 2 out of 10 readers look through the entire copy, while 8 out of 10 get their information from the headline.
Blog Readers By Age and Gender
Source: The Tree Group
Then, what’s the age range of these readers? Well, according to a Pingdom study, the average blog reader is 41 years old. However, this is a 2013 study.
According to Statista, 21% of internet users in the US between the ages of 18 to 29 read blogs.
Another study by Finances Online claims 30% of blog readers are between the ages of 31 to 40, which is the largest readership demographic. 37% of readers are 40 to 60 years old.
Between the ages of 25 to 30, only 17% are blog readers. The blog readership age percentage drops down to 10.3% for readers who are 19 to 24 years old.
And so, while blog reading is assumed to be a predominantly activity for the older generation, the majority of readers are millennials.
This is more clear when we look at how these age groups discover blog content. According to The Tree Group, 53% of users over the age of 55 find blogs from search. 39% discover blogs from Facebook feed, 34% from emails, and 23% from notifications on their mobile.
However, 45% of readers over 55 directly go to a blog website, compared to 37% of readers in age 18 to 24 age range. 44% of readers from 35 to 44 year old and 45 to 54 year old also hop to a blog website directly.
Meanwhile, in the 18 to 24 age range, 56% discover blogs from search engine and 54% from Facebook feeds. These are the primary ways they discover blog content. This indicates the older generation has more loyalty to certain blogs, while the younger generation mainly has questions they want answers to in mind.
This is also obvious from how 70% of readers prefer to read blogs between 9 to 10 a.m. It’s practically the newspaper reading hours for Gen X and Baby Boomers. This also makes it the best time to post blogs.
However, 59% of men read blogs in the evening and night, compared to 35% of women. In particular, Monday is the best day to post blogs. But, if you are looking for engagement, you will get it at 9 a.m. on a Saturday.
Business and Marketing Blogging Statistics 2023-2024
The B2B blogging trend for 2023 starts with 33% of marketing planning on including blog posts in their marketing strategy. This is because blogging has the third highest ROI at 9%, after videos and images at 25% and 12%.
30% of marketers also plan on using infographics, and while infographics can be stand-alone posts, they are often part of blog posts. Additionally, 29% of marketers use SEO websites and blogs to convert leads. 88% plan to continue doing SEO as they did in 2022, which includes blog posts.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
This is obvious from how 78% of B2B marketers have used blog posts to distribute content from the organization’s website. 50% also do guest blog posts and publish articles on third-party platforms. Guest posts, in particular, have increased from 43% to 50%.
How are they planning on maintaining and increasing this level of blog post creation? Well, 85% of marketers have already integrated AI into their writing. 44%, in particular, use tools like Jasper for text generation, although only 20% use it to write copy—an even lesser 5% use AI to write the entire content.
However, about 53% use AI to make minor edits, while 39% use it for major edits. Similarly, 49% of companies outsource content writing.
Whatever your method for creating content is, you can not skip out on blogs. Not when 77% of Fortune 500 companies maintain a blog. In total, there are 387 Fortune companies with a blog page.
Source: Statista
And it’s working because, according to Asset Digital Communications, 68% love reading content from a brand they are interested in. Once a person has information about a product, 60% of readers will interact with the product in some way.
Blogging, along with other content marketing methods, also costs 62% less than traditional advertising. Yet, only 33% of B2B companies have a blog. You are looking at an untapped market, despite businesses with blogs receiving 55% more visitors than those who don’t.
In fact, a business gets 67% more sales than those who don’t if they release a blog once or twice in a month.
But how much content would get you to the top 10 of search pages? Embryo’s word count study finds a blog needs around 2855 words on average to rank at 1. The average blog post takes 3 hours and 57 minutes to write.
You would also have to provide accurate content, as 32% of readers believe accuracy has the most effect on content quality for most brands.
Blogs also mean you get content for all other forms of media. 60% of marketers republish the same content in new forms two to five times.
HubSpot studies also found:
- Business with a blog get 126% more leads.
- Businesses with a blog have double the email traffic of their competitors.
- Marketers get 13x more ROI from blogging.
Content Marketing Institute also found in a study the conversion rate is 6 times higher for businesses with a content marketing strategy in place.
Blogger Key Stats 2023-2024
Source: First Site Guide
In a survey for First Site Guide, 49.32% of bloggers claim it is a full-time job for them. 31.84% treat it as a part-time job, while it is a hobby for 14.76%. For 4.08%, it is part and parcel of their corporate job.
In the same poll, it was revealed 44.17% of bloggers are aged 25 to 34, making it the largest age demographic. While blog readers tend to be older, the majority of bloggers are either millennials or Gen Xers.
34.66% of bloggers are 35 to 44 years old, 11.75% of bloggers are 45 to 54 years old, and a mere 1.26% are 64 to 74 years of age. Only 4.47% are 18 to 24 year olds, and 3.20% are 55 to 64 year olds. In other words, there is almost a similar number of Gen Z bloggers and Baby Boomer bloggers.
The blogger gender demographic is almost neutral, with 52.34% men and 47.38% women.
Globally, 28.41% of bloggers earn less than $50k per year. About 21.44% have a salary range of $50,000 to $74,999. Over 18.44% earn more than $75,000 to $99,999.
The top earners have a household income of $100,000 to $124,999.
22.52% of bloggers spend 3 to 5 hours on their blog. 20.97% spend 5 to 10 hours. 17.77% of bloggers take 1 to 3 hours and 10.29% spend less than 60 minutes. This includes the time they spend researching, looking for solutions, and brainstorming.
Blogging in the USA
US generates the highest amount of blog posts, which isn’t a surprise, considering the amount of English WordPress websites. 90.39% of bloggers are from the US, according to a First Site Guide survey.
However, the site has a higher US audience, which might have skewed the numbers spectacularly. Even so, it confirms US has over 50% of the bloggers at the least.
A study by 99 Firms claims 53.3% of bloggers in the US are 21 to 35 years old. Meanwhile, 20.2% of bloggers are younger than 20.
Another 19.4% fall somewhere between the 35 to 60 year age range. About 7.1% are older than 50.
In the US, 50.9% of bloggers are women and 49.1% are men, making this one of the few professions where there are more women.
Additionally, according to Glassdoor, US bloggers make an average yearly income of $67k per year. Their starting pay is $50k, while the top earners get $89k.
What are their sources of income?
70% of bloggers get their income from affiliate links, 57% from sponsored posts, and 49% from Pay Per Click ads. 35% also earn from freelance consulting and 25% from courses, as an older study from Finance Quick Fix finds.
Final Thoughts
While the definition of blogging has evolved, from traditional posts on a website to videos on YouTube, blogging would never go out of trend. It’s the quickest way to get information out to your customers.
Blogging is also self-reliant, where you could put up a post or two and gain benefits from it for years. Bloggers are not constantly accounting for the algorithm changes of social media.
Businesses, in particular, stand to gain a lot from blogging. Content can help them find their idea customers when traditional advertising method don’t work.