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
La blogosfera sigue creciendo: 60 veces mayor que hace 3 años
En su más reciente informe sobre el ‘estado de la blogosfera’, David Sifry (CEO de Technorati) confirma que el crecimiento no se ralentiza en absoluto. Technorati ya sigue casi 35 millones de blogs, y su número se ha ido duplicando cada 6 meses. El e…
State of the Blogosphere: *Lots* more blogs, posts, spam
Dave Sifry, the founder of Technorati, has posted the latest in his quarterly series of infoporny statistical tracking of blogs, which he calls the “State of the Blogosphere.” Technorati indexes all the blogs it can find — which is most of the public…
Blogs continue to double every 6 months – now 35M
Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, published a report today State of the Blogosphere, April 2006. The number…
Estado da blogosfera
A Technorati divulgou algumas estat
Great post. I find the 75,000 new blogs a day figure to be incredible!
Spam has indeed become a problem when searching technorati. Are there any plans to have a way for users to report splogs? Perhaps Technorati could provide either a basic contact form to report splogs, or something similar to craigslist.
Do you know what else is annoying? People who ambulance-chase current stories on the web, in order to promote their blogs in the comments section.
Reptilian Watch – http://www.bedoper.com/reptilian
is especially bad about doing that sort of thing.
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2.13 bilion blogs?
From David “Technorati” Sifry’s quarterly “State of The Blogosphere”:* 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…
2.13 billion blogs?
From David “Technorati” Sifry’s quarterly “State of The Blogosphere”:* 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…
Holy booming blogs, Batman
Technorati does the numbers
These images are fantastic for helping clients understand the importance of the blog world… Thanks!
great post david, do you have any numbers on the total number of corporate blogs, you estimated this a few years ago. And I wondered if you had an update?
John Cass
State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000432.html
Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
The…
75,000 new blogs a day
Technorati’s David Sifry reports the blogosphere is continuing its growth rate – doubling every six months….
The almost 10% increase in active blogs after 3 months is probably the most significant stat to me. Suggests that not only is traffic to blogs as a whole increasing, but that bloggers are getting a better grasp on how to attract and RETAIN that traffic.
Thanks for a great update, David.
I’m wondering how the composition and the readership of the Technorati 100 has changed in the last few quarters. It’d be interesting to see those growth stats relative to that of the overall blog universe.
Second, it’d be interesting to understand how the categories are diversifying as the absolute number of blogs grow, i.e., which categories are the new blogs in the last quarter are focusing on vs. the new blogs in the previous quarter and/or last year.
Also numbers on how the use of Technorati tags might provide a window into the mainstreaming (or not) of tagging in general.
Thanks again.
Thank you. Do you have any data on interesting or atypical blog implementations? For example, feedback loops in blogs (other than comments), social network blogoshpere, visualizations, or outcomes-based blogging (trying to make something collaboratively in a blog)?
Carol Minton Morris
thanks for the info david. Out of curiosity, does the number above include things like myspace, livejournal, and other more closed community blogs?
Sifry Report: Blogosphere 60% Bigger Than 3 Years Ago, Doubling Every 6 Months
The state of the blogosphere is strong, doubling every 6 months, and 60 times bigger than three years ago according to Technorati president David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere for the 1st quarter of 2006. the high level of interesting, original cont…
How easy was it to generate this data? Is this data itself exposed through an RSS feed? It would be interesting to see a chart of the emergence of WebPress (or rather, decline of MovableType with each new version).
This is unblievable. The pace will slow down, as the law of large numbers will inevitably rear its head. Nonetheless, I am amazed, and Mr. Sifry is looking like a very, very smart man! Thank you for bringing us Technorati.
David Sifry and Technorati Get On My Nerves
I wonder how many new blogs are real blogs, and how many are just spam. Also with the blog lives starting to live longer, I wonder at the quality to quantity ratio.
Does anyone track the consumption side of the supply demand equation ? How are blogs spreading into mainstream users daily internet habits ? Could be millions of blogs that are never visited at all.
State of the Blogosphere and Blogosphere Growth
Wow… How does Blogger and similar services keep their services free with such growth?!
Originally we thought of ourselves as a Sydney based technology company… As of this momment-my company is holding a Web 2 /social software education forum in the Philippines…here we are in Quezon City -thousands of kilometers from what we once thought of as our market. We are webcasting live our education in our blog…this technology enables in fashions many fail to yet realise.
It is a small world, and getting smaller!
Kevin Leversee
pandorasquared.com
I would be more interested in seeing how many of these blogs had been posted on in the last month or two. How many blogs out there does nothing for me seeing that many people blog for a couple of months and then quit.
While the world may be getting smaller, the battle for attention is becoming more and more challenging. One of the cool things about Technorati is that it encourages us all to be more and more specific about our subject area. As blog readers we are more interested in specialties than in broadsheet type news. We want the personal view, not the world view. But I am way behind … I have 74,975 new blogs to read today!
This is fascinating stuff, but of course it begs the question: how much of this new blog-material is any good? There’s spam, and there’s splogs, but how much is haircut blogs, how much is “wow, a blog, tech is fab, what do I say now?” how much is “my webguy said I needed a blog and I’m a coach, dammit, so I shall blog…’today I was reminded of an important customer service point…” etc?
Is there an authoritative blog critic out there? I’m familiar with plenty of “submit your blog” sites, but they seem entirely too enamoured of bouncing blue kittens, soundtracks, and funky floating cursortrails, rather than analyzing the content.
Blogosphere 60 times larger than 3 years ago
Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months and it is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago! (some nice graphs included in the article).
Blog growth
Dave Sifry of Technorati reports that the "blogosphere" is growing by leaps and bounds in his latest state of the "blogosphere" post. It is worth reading the whole thing but I’ll post the conclusion:Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Mill
David this is really amazing and I have blogged about it today. I wonder how many women blog compared to men?
David this is really amazing and I have blogged about it today. I wonder how many women blog compared to men?
Sifry Report: Blogosphere 60% Times Bigger Than 3 Years Ago, Doubling Every 6 Months
The state of the blogosphere is strong, doubling every 6 months, and 60 times bigger than three years ago according to Technorati president David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere for the 1st quarter of 2006. the high level of interesting, original cont…
Sifry Report: Blogosphere 60 % Times Bigger Than 3 Years Ago, Doubling Every 6 Months
The state of the blogosphere is strong, doubling every 6 months, and 60 times bigger than three years ago according to Technorati president David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere for the 1st quarter of 2006. the high level of interesting, original cont…
Indeed, impressive numbers, but what continues to disappoint me is that the number of business executives who are blogging is so small. Recently I was working on an initiative for a group blog for an organization of business leaders. From emails sent out to over a thousand people, we found that only 3 had active blogs.
Dos visiones sobre los transgénicos
Hoy en Chile Potencia Alimentaria se publica la siguiente nota que está escrita por Mario Valdivia, en la que se muestran dos puntos de vista respecto a los organismos genéticamente modificados:
En favor y en contra de los transgénicos
A favor: Ahora
Looking at data on Bloglines users, we’ve concluded that
- Feeds that really matter (FTRMs) are a small fraction of Blogosphere
- FTRMs double in a year rather than six months
- Most users follow a modest number of feeds
For details, see http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/04/18/preferential-attachment-in-feeds/
Tim
It’s Getting Harder and Harder to See the Edges
I won’t bother you with the blur that is my life (not yet anyway) but it’s worth pointing out three key sets of data that have come about in the last couple of weeks that show us just how fast…
Amazing! Even that sounds like an understatement…75000 blogs a day? Awesome!
“The Blogosphere doubles ever 6 months”
Awesome. This means that by 2009 there will be 8.8B blogs!
“Feeds that really matter (FTRMs) are a small fraction of Blogosphere”
I’ve been calling this the attentive blogosphere.
This isn’t what this means.
This means that for PEOPLE THAT USE RSS AGGREGATORS (which is in turn a small percentage of Internet users) use a small portion of the blogosphere.
I think this is an important distinction because RSS aggregator users aren’t internet-typical just yet.
Most people find blogs via search engines or read them directly in browsers (gasp!).
Of course any speculation on what percentage of users are using blogs only within browsers is totally up for grabs.
Kevin
State of the Blogosphere: 75k New Blogs a Day
No origami?
How to map the Blogosphere in numbers?
Good points about the feed readers. Fewer than ten percent of my readers use feeds. Naturally, the percentage is higher for tech blogs, as the readers are more technical. Hit counters do contribute information, once you strip out bot hits, although they vary in the quality and type of info they provide.
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Ugh… it’s kind of discouraging to see the figures, actually. How do you build readership when your just another small fry amonst millions of writers looking for the same exposure?