ClickZ: Hostilities flared this week between the two best-known blog networks after comScore released a blog readership study that was co-sponsored by Six Apart and blog network Gawker Media.
Media buyers have been clambering for just the sort of demographic profiling it offers, and blog publishers should benefit overall from its discovery that the blog audience is both richer and younger than the overall Internet audience.
Yet the research has been challenged by several prominent bloggers, including — most loudly — Jason Calacanis, publisher of Gawker rival Weblogs Inc. Network (WIN).
Calacanis accused comScore of bias and inconsistency, pointing specifically to discrepancies between blog traffic rankings offered by the report versus those sites’ own stats packages. He calls into question the number of sites published by report sponsor Gawker Media that fall in the top 20 sites ranked by unique visitors and visits. And he’s particularly appalled at the report’s rating of Gawker.com over WIN’s Engadget.com.
On his blog, Calacanis has accused comScore of bias based on the personal relationship between Denton and the report’s author, Rick Bruner.
Denton dismissed Calacanis’ objections.
“I know it galls Jason Calacanis that his sites are about as memorable as Burger King franchises, and that none register among the top blogs, except Pete Rojas’s Engadget,” he said.
Denton added, “But Jason Calacanis misses the big picture. The study finally provides evidence for what we’ve all hoped for: that blog readers are younger and richer than average, and, one hopes, thinner.”
