"These are not people who are politically idealistic and born yesterday," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs the popular liberal site DailyKos.
"I think people want to dismiss blog readers as unemployed people in their basement. Apparently not," said Glenn Reynolds of the conservative blog InstaPundit.
The responders said they spent an average of ten hours a week reading blogs, often for "news I can't find elsewhere."
"These are people who are presumably overworked and overstressed like the rest of us, only they find 10 hours a week to look at blogs. It's a mark of their alienation" from other forms of media, said Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.
Chris Bowers at MyDD has dissected the results.
As to TalkLeft's readers, 46% have a post-graduate degree. Another 35% have college degrees. That's 81%. As to party affiliation, 69% are Democrats and 18% are independents. A whopping 85% have written or called a politician at the state, local, or national level, while 77% have signed petitions. They read the major newspapers and The Nation, American Prospect, Mother Jones, Slate and The Onion. Income is high (48% earn between $60 and $150k while 13% earn between $150 and $300k). 50% have donated online to a political candidate or campaign. They also buy plane tickets and computers, music and books. 77% do not have their own blog.
They read blogs for faster news, news they can't get elsewhere and for a better perspective.
These are interesting results for advertisers. As Chris Bowers summarizes:
Active readers of Democratic political blogs are very highly educated, highly politically active, quite well-to-do, voracious consumers of media, not very young, and skew male. Apart from the male part, these indicators fly in the face of stereotypes about progressive bloggers, who are supposedly drooling, rabid, anti-social, uneducated, teenage extremists with no political value and out of touch with current events.
Quite to the contrary, active blog readers have a tremendous amount of political capital to spend, and are in search of adventurous progressive politicians and organizations to spend it on. Is there any major progressive political group in the country that would not want to appeal to the demographics of this readership? High concentrations of wealthy, highly educated, highly active media junkies cannot be found in many areas in either this or any other country. Mischaracterize and misjudge them at your own peril.
