Apple’s iPhone has generated a great deal of buzz, with many articles appearing in the mainstream media. But the biggest beneficiary has been the blogosphere, according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
The traffic generated by the phone is “higher than any product launch we’ve monitored”, Nielsen BuzzMetric’s Pete Blackshaw told Netly News. Some 1.5% of all blog posts mentioned the iPhone in the week following Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the product in January. This sort of over-excitement can be expected, as Apple has a hardcore of devoted fans, as well as sceptics.
But digging deeper, two sites emerge as the biggest winners from the iPhone buzz – tech blogs Engadget and Gizmodo. Engadget’s traffic has jumped by 30% since the phone was announced. The day of the unveiling, its live coverage of the event received 10 million page views. Gizmodo has also benefited, with the site now getting 1.8 million page views a day.
These figures would suggest that these tech blogs are challenging and in same cases supplanting mainstream media when it comes to news from the world of technology. Established media simply cannot compete in offering the detailed and exhaustive coverage that these dedicated tech blogs provide.
In the past, the audience for this would have been dismissed as nerds. Now technology has become a part of everyday life. The iPhone has shown that there are some products that can arouse an intense appetite for information from new forms of media.
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