Refresh.ro & Vola.ro profiled Romanian blogosphere
Refresh.ro and Vola.ro, Romanian online tourism agency, researched Romanian blogosphere, with the results grouped within BR 2011, a study that ran between February 1st-March 25th. The study made a profile of the Romanian blogger, the content he/she generates and also gathered data on the financial side of blogging.
The study started with a personal list sent to Romanian A-list bloggers (@40 people) and, afterwards, was expanded to entire blogosphere, via the most used social media channels in Romania: Twitter, Facebook and blogs. In the end, 701 bloggers contributed to this study.
Romanian Blogger’s demographic profile
Summarized, the Romanian blogger is male, over 25 y.o., lives in Bucharest, has superior education (University or master’s degree) and started to write on the blog after 2009.
Most of the Romanian bloggers are aged 25-34 yo (42%), followed by 18-24 (32%) and 35-44 (16%). Under 18 bloggers, the ones between 45-49 and the ones over 50 are each scoring under 5% in the total bloggers population, according to the study.
Segmented on genders, male bloggers are dominant, representing 60% of the total number of bloggers.
When it comes of education, 68% of Romanian bloggers attended higher education and finished university studies, some of them attending or having already a masters degree or a phd. Compared to 2009, the number of student /high school bloggers decreased, from 25% in 2009 to 15% in 2011 and from 15% to 9%
Also, Bucharest is the town 48% of Romanian bloggers are living in, followed by regions like Cluj (6%), Timis (5%), Iasi (4%) and Prahova & Brasov (3% each)
Although 53% of Romanian bloggers started writing after 2009, 14% of total bloggers that were involved in the study are writing since before 2006. Most of the bloggers that are writing since before 2006 are today’s pro-bloggers, people that made from blogging a way of living, a source of income and a business card; for some of them, blogging is the only source of income
Blogs and their kind
Percentage wise, the number of generalist blogs is the same as in 2009, with a slight decrease, from 87% to 85%. Same applies also to niche blogs (with an under 1% decrease), and with 28% of respondents saying they are managing also a niche blog.
From the total, 8% are also handling a company blog and 12% are writing on collective blogs too
In terms of time invested in blogging, the result is similar to 2009, 67% of bloggers saying they are spending at least one hour writing, while 18% say they spend even over 3 hours writing on the blog
The percentage of bloggers that use own domains and hosting increased 3% compared to 2009, with 41% of respondents using one of the most known blogging platforms, such as wordpress.com, ori blogger.com.
From a Romanian blogger’s point of view, success is generated by blog’s traffic (18%), number of received comments (17%) and number of reactions in social media (16%).
In the end of the list, with 10%, are the money earnings and the position in a traffic or influence top (12%)
What do Romanian bloggers like to write on their blogs?
20% of bloggers involved in the study said they are writing on their blog on daily basis, 32% almost every day and 48% are writing once a week or once a month. Also, only 10% of them are writing over 100 articles a month.
The favorite subjects are personal, with over 60% writing about themselves and the world around them. Entertainment, music, movies and tech/online are the next on the list
On the other side, the most impactful subjects on blogs are related to politics (45%), followed by new-media, entertainment, general news, monden, tech, and personal subjects
84% of the bloggers produce text content, with photo and video on 2nd and 3rd place (77%, respectively 37%). When it comes of materials from other sources they put on their blogs, images are on the 1st place (81%), followed by video (64%), than text (36%) and audio (16)
Moreover, in 2011, 14% of bloggers used their mobile phone for different activities related to blogging, increasing from 8% in 2009.
RSS or not?
According to the study, 52% of Romanian bloggers are offering full feed (compared to 62% in 2009), which means their articles can be read fully with an RSS Reader or on e-mail, without actually accessing the blog. Only 30% of respondents are offering a partial feed, with readers needing to access the blog to read the full content of an article.
77% of Romanian bloggers don’t know how many RSS readers they have.
About brands and services…to write or not to write?
73% of Romanian bloggers (+10% compared to 2009) are writing about brands and products/services offered by them, with 66% writing about brands they like or don’t agree, depending on daily life events, while 44% (increasing from 17% in 2009) are writing recensions and 15% just relay rumors or info about companies.
It’s all about traffic?
When it’s about traffic, almost 45% bloggers said they have fewer than 1,000 unique visitors a month, while almost 35% say their medium monthly traffic is between 1,000-10,000 unique visitors. 10% of bloggers don’t know how many visitors they have.
When it comes of higher traffic, around 7% have between 10K-25k unique visitors per month, around 3% – 25k-50k, around 2% between 50k-100k and around 1% over 100k unique visitors per month.
Money makes the world go round!
From the total number of bloggers that participated to the study, 32% say that they earned money from blogging, up from 25% in 2009. Moreover, 15 bloggers said that blogging is their main income source.
Moreover, 88 of the participants in BR 2011 earned, in 2011, more than Euro 1,000 from blogging.
An estimate on Romanian blogosphere shows that this is an industry that, at least at declarative level, spent Euro 619,750 from companies’ budgets in 2011
Refresh.ro
According to the same source, Euro 500,000 went to a total of 51 bloggers, representing 8% of the total number of participants in BR 2011, with a quarter million Euro being divided between 13 bloggers.
For 2012, bloggers are expecting to cash in around Euro 1M (more exact – Euro 955,250)
When it’s about the money, bloggers mainly get it from advertorials (31%), banners (23%), affiliate marketing (18%) and special projects (14%). The lest money are generated by page branding (4%), guest speakers at events (3%), RSS feed advertising and video advertising (1% each).
What do bloggers spend for their blogs?
Romanian bloggers are investing on their blogs, as 52% of them declared for BR 2011 (+10% compared to 2009).
For their blogs, Romanian bloggers mainly pay for hosting and web domains (48%), marketing (10%) and editors (3%).
What do you get from blogging?
Among benefits Romanian bloggers got from blogging there are visibility in their industry (46%), products and services (36%) and finding a job (14%).
Besides writing on their blogs, Romanian bloggers are also very active in social media, with most of them (95%) using Facebook (up from 70% in 2009). Also, 71% of them have and use a Twitter account and 37% are present on LinkedIn.