Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
The Swedish free daily newspaper Metro will start distribution in 17 new cities in Sweden, according to an article in Svenska Dagbladet. Kalmar, Växjö, Halmstad, Umeå, Luleå and Sundsvall are some of the candidates. Metro have declined to comment on the information.
Metro announced today that its global daily readership is up 22% to 18.5 million readers. Metro now has 59 editions in 19 countries.
The first acquisition of a blog in Sweden will take place in the coming weeks according to an article in marketing weekly Resumé. A company in the Bonnier corporation is currently negotiating to purchase the fashion blog Manolo.se and sources say that it is Sydsvenskan, one of the larger dailies in Sweden that will make the investment.
– We are negotiating. The deal is in the final stages, we have come far enough to conclude that it will happen, says Tomas de Souza, one of the three founders, to Internetworld.
The information that was leaked in the comments at Erik’s blog three days ago seems to be correct.
Manolo.se had 35,000 visitors in August.
Sweden today started to convert to digital television in the terrestrial network by turning off the analogue signals on the island of Gotland. Information is provided in eight languages. As expected (change=bad), everybody’s against it.
There’s been a lot of talk the last few days about two articles in Aftonbladet and Internetworld regarding how many Swedish blogs that currently exist. Since I started to do some research in the matter about a week ago, I might as well give you my two cents.
Aftonbladet says 10,000. Internetworld’s Urban Lindstedt made some research that suggests there are some 18,000 Swedish blogs, based on the following number of blogs hosted [The numbers have been updated since this post, check the link above to Internetworld for the latest revision]:
Blogsoft 9600
Spaces 3460
Passagen 2700
Bloggi 761
Blogger 718
Blogdrive 182
WordPress 80
S-info.nu 79
Typepad 75
Movable Type 34
Total: 17 689
I have a few questions about these numbers:
#1: This would give BlogSoft, Passagen and MSN Spaces a market share of 91 per cent which I find completely impossible to believe.
#2: Roland at BlogSoft told me in an email a few days before these articles appeared that BlogSoft has 9,600 registered accounts and that 1,500 to 2,500 can be defined as real bloggers, depending on definition. Henrik Torstensson states that BlogSoft is supposed to host about 3,500 blogs, unclear where this figure comes from. So, a qualified guess is that BlogSoft hosts some 3,000 to 3,500 blogs and has about 6,000 registered users that are in the process of setting up a blog, but haven’t yet begun posting.
#3: One of the most popular blog portals is Nyligen.se which tracks recently updated Swedish blogs. To be included in the portal you must actively submit an application. By checking the id numbers of each individual blog at Nyligen.se we can assume that more than 3,500 blogs are members of the portal, so it should be fairly representative of the Swedish blogosphere. I checked about 230 random blogs at Nyligen.se and can conclude that BlogSoft (blogg.se and webblogg.se) is nowhere near half the market, or a third for that matter. What I found was that 8 out of 10 Swedish blogs either use a personal domain name (can also include the address to a personal webpage hosted by their ISP, like Telia) or are hosted by Blogspot. About 1 out of 10 is hosted by BlogSoft.
We can guess that new blogs at Passagen and MSN Spaces (and possibly blogg.se and webblogg.se) are not as accustomed yet to the practice of pinging posts to a portal, and therefore are mis-represented in the stats above. Now assume that the market share for BlogSoft is closer to 10 per cent or let’s say 15 per cent due to the mis-representation noted above, and that the number of hosted blogs are in the vicinity of 3,500 to choose an even number (that is also supported by Torstensson). That would give us a suggested total number of Swedish blogs to between 23,000 and 25,000.
This way we can count backwards to get the following approximations about the Swedish blogosphere:
Market share/Host/Number of blogs
25% Blogspot 6000
25% Own domain 6000
15% Blogsoft 3600
15% MSN Spaces 3600
10% Passagen 2400
10% Bloggi + rest 2400
Total 24,000
The relation between BlogSoft, MSN Spaces and Passagen doesn’t seem to be that far off the mark, so I needed to assume that the number of blogs at Blogspot and blogs with their own domain name are not 80 per cent, rather closer to 50 per cent.
Of course, this whole arithmetical example is based on a series of half-guesses and wild assumptions, so consume it with a healthy dose of scepticism. And I am well aware of the difference between a blog software like Blogger, Blogsoft or Typepad and the actual domain name of a blog. But I don’t think it is more wrong than Internetworld and Aftonbladet. I would love to read other bloggers’ thoughts on the matter. Am I a crackpot or are we getting closer to a figure we can agree on?
Footnote: Nyligen.se only lists 1,500 blogs on the website, but I understand that blogs that have not sent a ping in two months are not visible, which further mis-represents “inexperienced bloggers”, like bloggers that don’t use a personal domain for example.
[Edit: Bad link. Thanks Sebastian.]
Update: Christian Davén has analyzed the blog tools from another Swedish blog portal: Blogwalk. According to his stats, BlogSoft has a market share of only 2 per cent. Blogger dominates with 45 per cent. This supports my feeling that there are more blogs than the 18,000 suggested by Internetworld. (If BlogSoft has a reliable number of hosted blogs, then the total market will be greater if BlogSoft’s market share is smaller.)
Having spent three weeks in my summer house in July, I had to wade through hundreds of emails when I returned back to civilization. One of them was from one of largest companies in Sweden, I will spare you which one because I am a friend of their head of PR. I believe it is the first time I have been approached by the communications department of a large Swedish company in my role as a blogger. I’m glad that public relations professionals are aware that bloggers are influential and potentially a target for PR pitches. But when it is performed in such a clueless way, I’m baffled.
First of all, the PR person hasn’t read my blog. If she had, she would know that I never ever write about stuff from her company’s industry. Is it really so hard to figure out that I blog about PR and media? It is in the headline. I do not blog about your products.
Second, if you are in the process of sending out a mass mailing, please make sure that I don’t feel like I’m on the receiving end of a spam attack. The email I got had obviously been forwarded at least once, so it had the “>” sign before every line, and the second half of the first sentence had apparently been edited, because it had a different color than all the other lines, at least in my email program. Translated:
> Hello,
>
> You receive this email because you are one of the most frequently read and
noticed blogs in Sweden.
>
> We wonder if you are interested in subscribing to press releases from XYZ?
Now, I am not trying to be mean, rather show that if you are pitching bloggers, you need even more finesse and fingerspitzgefühl than if you are pitching journalists. Not the other way around because bloggers will tell everyone that you’re making a mistake. Besides, it would have been smarter to let people sign up to press release subscriptions via the online press room or via RSS, but of course you can’t.
Blogs are just old homepages according to free-lance journalist Marie-Louise Samuelsson. From Media 8 at TV8 tonight:
Q: Vilken sorts betydelse tror du nyhetsbloggar har för den svenska journalistkåren idag?
Samuelsson: Det är överskattat nu. Det är jättehype kring bloggar men det är som sagt gamla hemsidor.
Translation:
Q: What type of effect do you think that news blogs have today on Swedish journalists?
Samuelsson: It’s overrated now. There is a huge hype around blogs, but like I said, they are only old homepages.