Technorati’s latest report on the State of the Blogosphere titled "Beyond Search" has very interesting stats and metrics.

Some top Blogs (in red) such as Boing Boing, Engadget, PostSecret and Daily Kos get as many backlinks as many of the MSN (Mainstream Media). That’s amazing since Boing Boing, according to John Battelle, one of Boing Boing’s and Wired Magazine founders who I met at Webmasterworld last June in New Orleans, cost 800 dollars a month to run initially!   I got that number directly from John Batalle and he also spoke about it when he gave the Keynote speach at WebMasterWorld New Orleans in June 2005.

Next, Dave Sifry charted traffic horizontally and more and more Blogs compete for traffic as the traffic tail becomes longer (see above).

One issue I have with Dave’s metrics is he’s using backlinks rather than Page Views or Visits.  Obviously, he can’t know what the visits for each of the sites really are (few companies will tell you that information). 

Using Backlinks to measure traffic and influence is imperfect at best.  Maybe Alexa stats could give a better idea of the actual reach of these blogs vs. MSM.   Backlinks are being used because that’s all he’s got - he can’t tell you how many visitors or what the quality of traffic was for each of the sites in this chart - and that’s what really matters.

What I find interesting is not that Blogs can compete with MSM, but the cost to publish a Blog is atomic compared to running a MSM Newspaper or Magazine.  But then again, the purposes of a Blog vs. MSN are different - they can’t be matched up 100%.

In other words, Technorati’s comparisons about Blog traffic are interesting, but very incomplete because they don’t take in account actual visits or page views, only backlinks.