Dave Pollard estimates the readership that each tier of today’s bloggers is receiving.
If you’re an average A-list blogger (those getting at least 15,000 hits
per day), your 150,000 40-second visitors in aggregate are spending
1700 hours per day reading and commenting on your blog. The average
B-list blogger (those getting at least 1,000 hits per day) is getting 62
hours per day of 90-second-per-visit aggregate reader attention, the
average C-list (150-1,000 hits-per-day) blogger 13 hours per day of
aggregate reader attention, and the average up-and-coming (50-150
hits-per-day) blogger 2.5 hours per day. These are not staggering
numbers, but certainly an encouraging return on time invested in
writing.
(Check out the charts on his blog.) He then compares those numbers against the readership of traditional newspaper columnists…
Compare this to a daily local paper. According to Encarta,
in 2000 the 1500 US dailies printed an aggregate 50 million copies per
day with an average readership of 2 people per copy. A Readership
Institute survey suggests the
average reader spends 15 minutes per day reading the paper. Assuming
half of that is spent reading classifieds, ads, comics etc., that means
the average US daily paper gets 8300 hours per day of aggregate reader
attention. Assuming an average of 50 articles, editorials and columns
per edition, that works out to 170 hours’ reader attention per article.
…Dave then optimistically concludes…
What this means is that if blog readership continues to soar (doubling
every 18 months) and newspaper readership continues to stagnate, in
three years the average B-list blogger will be getting significantly more reader
attention than the average unsyndicated US newspaper article or column,
and the average A-list blogger will be getting almost as much reader
attention as the average US daily paper.
Eight Diagrams 
do you have suggestions to grow readership by getting new readers in?