State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
69Yes, another quarter has passed, and it is time to take a look at the numbers!
For historical perspective, you can see earlier State of the Blogosphere reports from February 2006, July 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004.
The State of the Blogosphere is strong.
I continue to marvel at it, but the blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace. Technorati currently tracks 35.3 Million weblogs, and the blogosphere we track continues to double about every 6 months, as the chart below shows:
The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.
New blog creation continues to grow. Technorati currently tracks over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day – and 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That’s an increase both absolute and relative terms over just 3 months ago, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were active. In other words, even though there’s a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity.
In addition to that, about 3.9 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly. Here’s a chart of the number of new blogs created each day, from January 2004 to April 2006:
Spam, Splogs and Spings
Spam blogs and their cousins Spings (which I described in January’s report) continue to present infrastructure providers like Technorati a challenge, as more people rely on understanding the real-time web There has been an increase in the overall noise level in the blogosphere during 2006, but aside from a few notable spam storms (“sporms”? Just how far can you take this naming system?) noted in red in the chart above, the high level of interesting, original content being created greatly outweighs the fake or duplicate content listed on splogs.
Posting Volume
A better indicator of the growth of the blogosphere than simply the number of new blogs created each day is the rate of postings to those blogs. Daily Posting Volume tracked by Technorati is now over 1.2 Million posts per day, which is about 50,000 posts per hour. The blogosphere also reacts to world events. I’ve pointed out a number of the spikes in posting volume that have accompanied major news events in the chart below of posting volume:
I wasn’t able to identify all of the spikes, but I did find some of the notables. For example, it certainly appears that technology product launches attract great interest in the blogosphere – seems that we just can’t restrain our inner geekiness when products like the iPod Video and the Intel Macintoshes were launched. Posting volumes on those two days even eclipsed blog coverage and commentary of the Superbowl and the 2006 State of the Union speech.
In summary:
- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
Next: The growth of tagging, and the Blogosphere broken down by language
Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, postingvolume, posts, postvolume, pr, scaling, search, search engine, sotb, sotb2006, spam, spamblog, statistics, stats, technorati, weblog, weblogs
Related posts:
- State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
- State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 2: On Language and Tagging
- State of the Blogosphere, August 2006
- State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 1: Blog Growth
- State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
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Chris Edwards has noticed [1] that some of the spikes are attributed to some events in this report, and to *different* events in your February 06 report [2]. For example, the spike labeled now “iPod Video” was labeled “Iraq Constitution” in February. You can see the difference better in this graphic:
http://blog.basturea.com/extra/technorati-graphics-4.gif
Is there a mistake in labeling the spikes?
Thank you for the report!
[1] http://blog.hackingcough.com/2006/04/multipurpose_sp.htm
[2] http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000419.html
These are some big numbers, but it’d be interesting to see them broken down a bit more. Posting volume is definitely the key to tracking the growth of the blogosphere. As we all know there are far too many “tire kickers” (as David puts it) out there who create a blog and abandon it. Or — and I’m guilty of doing this in my early days — there are bloggers who create a blog on, say, Blogspot but can’t decide which URL to register so they register three or four just to make sure noone else grabs them before they do. Though that’s probably not as rampant as I make it out to be.
As far as breaking down the numbers, I’d be interested to see how many corporate blogs are out there, as well as professional blogs (like this one), and then personal blogs that entertain or provide knowledge (i.e. capable of attracting loyal readers who have no personal ties to the blogger), followed by blogs that are merely personal journals (i.e. not intended for other readers or read only by a few close friends). This would be followed finally by dead blogs and splogs.
Even if they were only rough percentages of those categories, it would help. Anyone have any best guesses?
Dave — you keyed into the idea of the conversational ability of blogs originally and you were one of the first to do so.
Is there any way to track the loop-backs other than links in? Mutual looping for more than a one-way conversation? Measuring spiking chatter is topical but measuring the mutual conversation of influentials would be interesting.
Thanks for all you do and have done.
Alex Barnett podcast archive
Microformats Podcast, March 31, 2006
“Here’s a great podcast for you. All about microformats…”…
No doubt about the impact of bloggers…and we’re proud to have added an ‘editor’s blog’ to our alternative news site!
Our readership is extraordinary….both in numbers and in intelligence – as we can tell from the comments and the email we get every day.
Jesse’s Blog has been linked around the globe on a regular basis. Come on down and click on “editor’s blog” so you can read our views for yourself:
TvNewsLIES.org
Use http://www.blogghost.net for free blog hosting!
State of the Blogosphere: 75k New Blogs a Day
Jede Sekunde ein neuer Blog
Schreibe gerade meinen Vortrag f
Good statistics. But what do we actually know about this last 16 million-odd blogs that have come online? What do they write about? What kind of people are they?
Any idea what that huge dip in blogging was between the London bombings and Katrina? Did the most bloggers just take that time off?
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三言二拍：普通网民根本不需要blog服务？
以流量、读者数量这种媒体思维，去理解网民的blog需求，确实“无解”。但是，既然情书、日记、资料夹、便签都是普通人的需求，为什么他们就“根本不需要blog”？
Wow, that’s a big blogosphere you got there
Every three months, Dave Sifrey of Technorati drags out his abacus and counts up the number of blogs in a “State of the Blogosphere” report. This quarter’s report is out, and here’s the good stuff: Technorati is now tracking over…
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