The 'blog economy,' explored

The Grasshopper Group just published an interesting infographic that shows the prevalence of blogging across the globe -- and who's making money from it and who's doing it as a hobby.

Some nuggets:

• North America has the most bloggers that are known by geographic location: 38% of the total, versus 19% coming from the EU and 8% from Asia-Pacific. (The location of 33% is unaccounted for.)
• The mix of bloggers has shifted more toward self-employed professionals -- from nine percent of the total a year ago to 21% this year. Corporate bloggers make up a smaller slice of the pie, however -- from four percent last year to one percent this year. This doesn't necessarily mean there are fewer corporate bloggers, however -- the overall number of bloggers has probably expanded greatly over the past year. No definitive stats available, but BlogPulse puts the current number of blogs at more than 151 million. Grasshopper says the greatest percentage, 65 percent, are hobbyists, but this is down from 72 percent last year.
  
• A majority of bloggers, 51%, say they derive income from their blogging activities, and 17% say this is their primary source of income.
• The average annual revenue generated from blogs is $42,000.
• Seventy-nine percent of bloggers have college degrees; 43% have graduate degrees.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com