Sifry's Alerts

Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, September 2008

I'm very pleased to announce that the next installment of the State of the Blogosphere is out! It has been about a year since the last report, and the Technorati team has really worked hard to make this report something comprehensive, interesting, and informative.

One of the big changes this year is that along with a comprehensive scan of Technorati's complete database, we also did a massive survey of bloggers who have registered with Technorati - a detailed survey with dozens of detailed questions about themselves, how they blog, and more. Altogether over 1,290 completed surveys came in from over 60 countries, with over 1,000 respondents (83%) providing their URLs and email addresses for follow-up. More information about the survey methodology is here. The report is so big, in fact, that we're releasing it in 5 parts:

Day 1: Who Are the Bloggers?
Day 2: The What And Why of Blogging
Day 3: The How of Blogging
Day 4: Blogging For Profit
Day 5: Brands Enter The Blogosphere

Enough of the preamble! Here's some juicy nuggets:

• Technorati is currently tracking 133 million blogs (we've done a LOT of culling spam blogs, and the number of bloggers keeps growing!)
• 7.4 Million blogs have posted in the last 120 days - that's 5.5% of all blogs we track.
• 1.5 Million blogs have posted at least once in the last 7 days.
• There are now, on average, 900,000 blog posts tracked every 24 hours. That means that Technorati's tracking 37,500 new blog posts per hour, or 10.4 new blog posts per second!

Here's some more highlights from the survey of Technorati bloggers:

• The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off.
• The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.
• Median investment and revenue (which is listed in the full report) is significantly lower, around $100-$200 per year.

There's so much rich data in there, lots offered for study. I don't think anyone has ever done as detailed a study of bloggers with as many participants, which means that you can slice and dice the data in a number of ways and still have enough respondents to have statistical significance. For example, blog networks serve nearly women bloggers at more than double the rate they serve male bloggers (16% of women who have advertising use a network, while only 7% of men who have advertising use a network). There's more to come, but go have a look at the initial report, hot and fresh at the Technorati site. If you want to see the older reports to compare, I've got them archived as well.

Kudos to the Technorati team for working so hard and getting this out. I'm really looking forward to the conversations it generates.

Technorati Tags:
report, sotb, technorati, blogosphere, stateoftheblogosphere, blogging