BlogHer Corners the Market of Women Bloggers

July 29th, 2008 by Nubby

Launched in 2005, Blog Her is an online community for women who blog. In addition, it holds the world’s largest conferences for bloggers (men are also welcome to attend).

Last weekend, BlogHer held its yearly conference in San Francisco and featured workshops on building web traffic, using open source software and dealing with the emotional issues related to blogging. The signs that this was a woman-centric event were everywhere; men’s bathrooms had been converted to women’s, there was a lactation room and child care available and onesies imprinted with blogging slogans were for sale.

For a relatively new conference, BlogHer is in high demand. According to the NYTimes.com, though men and women are creating blogs in nearly equal numbers, many women believe that they’re not being taken as seriously. Notably, they claim that they are making much less in advertising revenue.

Feelings of inequality among women bloggers have been reinforced through lists by the likes of Techcult, who recently listed its top 100 web celebrities (only 11 were women) and Forbes.com who created at similar list, which included 4 women out of 25 contenders.

Do you think that there is a noticeable imbalance between women and men in the blogging world? Or, is it a matter of quality content and other factors causing the divide?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under Opinion, Social Change, Thinking, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “BlogHer Corners the Market of Women Bloggers”

  1. Ma Rainey Says:
    July 31st, 2008 at 9:54 am

    No way! I just started blogging! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that sexism carries over into the world of blogs as well. Well I’m gong to keep writing anyway, dammit. I used to go around dressed up as a man back in my day, maybe it’s time to pull out my suits.

  2. Ma Rainey Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:25 pm

    Here’s a small study done in Sweden in February this year:
    http://www.kullin.net/2008/02/blogsweden-3-third-annual-swedish-blog.html

    • Women more often blog anonymously than men (49.2% compared to 34.0%).
    • Male bloggers blog to a higher extent than female bloggers to market a product or a service, to influence others, to strengthen their brand, to create an archive of information and because there is a need for more voices in the public debate.
    • Female bloggers blog to a higher extent than male bloggers to get in touch with others and to stay in touch with friends and family.
    • 66.5% of all bloggers update their blog every day. Female bloggers update their blogs more often than male bloggers (74.1% at least once a day, compared to 42.6% of male bloggers).
    • Male bloggers more often than female bloggers have ads on their blogs (14.3% compared to 7.4%).

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