Blog Survey: Results are in

Awhile ago, VideoJug asked for bloggers to participate in a survey, however genealogy as a specific topic was not addressed.

Tracing the Tribe would like to see the same sort of detailed survey run for genealogy bloggers, and with specific changes to reflect what we do and less emphasis on video content. Is anyone up for the challenge? It sounds like a job for Geneabloggers.com.

The questions are here, and you can click on each one to see results in a table and a colorful pie chart. Because VideoJug is, well, concerned with video, Part 4 focuses on that aspect.

Most geneabloggers may be more interested in the first three parts.

Part 1 asked personal questions: gender, age range, country, employment, age of blog.

Part 2 asked about the respondent's blog: visitors per month, reasons for running a blog, blog categories (genealogy was not a defined category), frequency of updates, reasons for starting, preferred mode of contact, methods for deciding what content to publish.

Part 3 asked about commercial blogging aspects: Annual investment the blog, form of revenue from blog, sponsored blog posts, regular revenue generated by the blog, consideration of accepting payment to write about certain subjects, minimum payment to write about certain subjects.

Part 4 focused on video content: does blog currently feature video content, what about future?, willing to syndicate content, commissioning content for website, creating video relevant to blog content, suitable video genre, powerful way to communicate, ability to generate ad revenue, revenue potential of video, using video as additional revenue model, hyper-syndication (still don't know what that is!), and, of course, the capacity of VideoJug and the blog to work together.

A quick summary of the questions is here:

-- 54.7% have run their blog for more than 2 years; 11% for under a year.

-- 73.6% run their blogs for personal or non-commercial reasons; 4.7% ran it as a corporate entity.

-- Leisure and Hobbies (29.2%), Food and Drink (17.8%) and Education 17.9%) are the most common blog category subjects.

-- Most people start their blog to either showcase their talent, to educate and help others, as a hobby, for corporate reasons, or purely for the monetary benefit.

-- 19.7% say personalised communication is still the best method of communication to which they would respond. Non-personalized communication is highly unlikely to get a response, even targed mail-merges.

-- 65.4% blog based on their personal choice of content. Only 3% blog on recommendations and press releases.

-- 70% spend less than $50 running their blog; 55% don’t have any advertising on their blog.

-- 29.6% indicate that the most popular blog revenue form is Google Adsense, followed by sponsored posts (6.5%) and product sales.

-- 56.5% would accept payment for a post; minimum payment ran from $2-$1,000 per post.

-- 3% earn more than $10K annually, so there is still potential to earn profits from blogging.

-- 57.3% feature video content; 35% didn’t understand the concept of video and blogging.

-- 12% stated that they would produce their own video content; 59.2% said they would consider making contextual relevant videos.

-- 39% indicated the most popular video content form was nstructional (how to).

-- Bloggers believe a text article is more powerful communication method than video.

-- Many bloggers were unsure of how to use video content as an additional revenue model.

Think about the possibilities.