Answering the question, "Do blogs drive traffic?"

A study by Perseus says that blogs are dominantly a write-only medium, with 66% of them abandoned by their authors for at least two months without being updated. And the Pew Internet and American Life Project notes that only 27% of Internet users read blogs as of November 2004. So the question is, do blogs drive traffic?

Blackfriars now has data that says, yes, they do. The Blackfriars Blog is now four months old, and I've been looking at our historical traffic counts both before we started the blog and after. The bottom line: Blackfriars now has about four times as many visitors each day as it did before we started the blog. Even that number is probably understated because a lot of pre-blog visits were generated by Web search robots. We now have technology that allows us to sift out the non-human visitors, and we're seeing even larger increases in human traffic.

Of course, the Blackfriars Blog is not a typical blog. Less than 10% of blogs link to mainstream news sources; we almost always do. Fewer than 107,000 blogs out of the 4.12 million blogs surveyed are updated weekly; the Blackfriars Blog is updated almost daily. But it appears that blogs do deliver on the Field of Dreams promise: if you build one, the visitors will come.