April 3, 2012
In February of this year, Foodista and Zephyr Adventures, organizers of the International Food Blogger Conference, conducted a State of Food Blogging Survey. The survey, inspired by the State of the Blogosphere conducted annually by Technorati, was to learn more about food bloggers: who they are, what motivates them, why they blog, how they use social media and ad networks, and how they measure success. 694 food bloggers completed a 30-question online survey. The respondents were primarily Citizen Bloggers (79%) with a small minority of Entrepreneurial Bloggers promoting their own company (17%) and the remainder connected to corporations (4%). A summary of the overall findings follows:
- -The prototypical food blogger is a married woman in her 30s - 40s living in the United States
- -She most likely comes to the food blogging world with some relevant food, marketing, or writing background.
- -A large population of bloggers is looking to capitalize on their blogs by becoming more involved in the food world professionally.
- -Almost all food bloggers judge their success based on the personal satisfaction they achieve. Very few judge this based on revenue earned.
- -The time spent posting, using social media, and reading other food blogs has increased dramatically for most food bloggers since they first began blogging.
- -The subject of “recipes” is by far the most common topic covered by food blogs, with 89% of blogs addressing this.
- -Twitter is more important than Facebook in terms of usage by food bloggers and is becoming even more important.
- -75% of food bloggers do not make any money at all from their food blog and another 19.5% make less than $200 per month.
- -82% of food bloggers have not attended a food blogger conference.
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