Information Week reports on a study from Internet metrics agency ComScore that shows a third of the Americans who are online visited a blog in the first quarter of the year. Whether they knew they were visiting a blog is another matter, one not addressed in the study, but ultimately that doesn’t matter a whole lot. What matters is that blogs—identified as such or not—represent a common destination or search result for typical web users.

That number—about 50 million—represents a 45% increase over the same quarter a year earlier. Further, each of the top four blog hosting services (Blogspot.com, LiveJournal.com, Typepad.com and Xanga.com) surpassed 5 million unique visitors in the quarter. From the Information Week article:

Blogspot.com’s 19 million unique visitors amounted to more visitors than the NYTimes.com, USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com. The numbers were “clear evidence that consumer-generated media can draw audience on par with traditional online publishers,” the report said.

Blogs written by women were among the top categories of blogs visited, topped only by political blogs, “hipster” lifestyle blogs, and tech blogs. Six Apart and Gawker Media were among the study sponsors.