On 24 February, Swedish daily Expressen launched a new feature enabling readers to start their own blogs at expressen.se. It only took a few days for Expressen to exclaim “Success!”, and indeed, they are already hosting about 1,000 blogs. However, these blogs have very few readers. I took a closer look on Friday 10 March, and at 9 PM, only 2 percent of the blogs had more than 50 daily visits. 86 percent had 5 visits or less and more than half had no visitors at all. All the 959 blogs only totalled a measly 4,315 daily visits that day (with three hours left of the day).
Naturally these figures might improve ovet time and it takes a while to build an audience, but bloggers who created mirror blogs on Expressen.se to drive traffic to their real blogs must have been deeply disappointed.
Update: Expressen tempts new bloggers with “an audience of a million”. Via Johan.
Footnote: Only daily visits via expressen.se are counted. Blogs may have other visitors that do not come from expressen.se.
Tags: newspapers, blogs, media.