This piece in the Wall Street Journal has concluded most blogs don’t get much traffic.

Right. They don’t.
Political and tech blogs from the US garner the most amount of traffic according to trackers, and compared to the web at large, the numbers are small.

God-blogs aren’t even on the radar screen.
There has been no solid research on this tiny corner of the blogosphere.
Why do you think that is?

Take your own survey from St. Blog’s or Who Links Who or one of the many god-blog aggregators running these days. Most blogs have Site Meter or Extreme Tracker on their sidebar, giving you a glimpse at their traffic. God-blogs that focus on US politics get a bit higher level of traffic than all-theology- al-the-time blogs, but not that much more as blogs multiply and the sub-field gets a bit more crowded.

Dialog: Breaking the Bubble figured that most god-blogs get between 40 and 60 visitors a day. I doubt that has changed.
I don’t think it’s a market that advertisers are going to go out of their way to target. And if they do, they’ll have to adapt. A webpage style ad and patricarchal approach won’t cut it on a blog or for the blogger.

Accepting advertising doesn’t give a blog legitimacy either.

As the article states, web pages aren’t counted. But blogs are a different kettle of fish. The technology of linking and pinging is what makes them unique.

No one has sole control of the definition of blog, but it seems to me that for the sake of counting, Technorati and BlogPulse are right to exclude the private blogs. That puts their estimates below those from some other analysts, but the companies are focusing on what they can directly count, and relying less on estimates.

Still, the number of blogs isn’t really that informative, since so many blogs are abandoned soon after they’re launched. It’s more useful to look at the volume of blog posts. According to a presentation by Technorati’s Mr. Sifry at the blog conference, daily volume is 800,000 to 900,000 posts. But Ms. Glance says BlogPulse, which says it has more blogs in its index, counts only between 350,000 and 450,000 posts a day — and that number has held steady for about a year, even as the total number of blogs has accelerated. Regardless of who’s right, notice that these number are well below estimates for the total number of blogs, countering the image of blogging as a multiple-times-a-day activity. Ms. Glance says that based on her research of activity in January, the typical active blogger posted an update just once every 10 days.

So do numbers make blogs revelant?
If one is seeking popularity, then yes.
Some god-bloggers believe the web is an evangelistic tool, therefore the more traffic the better. I don’t think many have thought it through, and are preaching to the choir.
Numbers matter to advertisers as they target the overall medium.
But I don’t think most of us bloggers are in this to attract advertising.

ComScore Media Metrix and Neilsen//NetRatings are the sources most often used by online advertisers to track unique visitors. Neither tracks blogs as a matter of course, though comScore did look up traffic for 13 prominent blogs in April, upon my request (I picked ones from the top of the various rankings). Just five met the company’s minimum threshold for statistical significance of about 150,000 monthly visitors. Media and gossip site Gawker had the most, with 304,000 unique visitors. The others that cleared the cut: Defamer (287,000), Boing Boing (250,000), Daily Kos (212,000) and Gizmodo (209,000). Among those that didn’t were prominent political blogs Instapundit, Power Line and Eschaton. (I asked NetRatings about the same 13 blogs, and it had reportable data only for Defamer, Daily Kos, Boing Boing and Gizmodo — and the sample sizes didn’t meet standards for statistical significance.)

Counting doesn’t give the medium legitimacy.
it is interesting to note that in Technorati’s tracking, two thirds of blogs are not in English.

The US led the way in developing much of the blogging technology available today. But I don’t believe they’ll remain the primary market, as Asia picks up the pace. If we’re going to count, and ’seek’ legitimacy - one thing that will be needed is effective translation tools.

Blogs don’t really’ fit’ a commerical or firm social model. It remains to be seen if US pundits will have the national impact some boast about on main stream media.
In countries such as Iran, the jury is out. Reform bloggers are risking their lives.
Blogs have proven effective in getting information out quickly when disaster has struck. Well run and well targeted local city blogs are noticed. But that kind of effort and effectiveness remains the exception, not the rule.

Most people blog because they can and because it’s fun. Trying to quantify this behavior is a bit like analysing children’s play.
It’s a facinating and informative hobby, but it’s not for everyone.
And if there are 60 million blogs world wide, with bloggers entering and leaving at a hyper pace, it doesn’t make blogging any less legitimate.
Ask any blogger.