August 01, 2005

State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 1: Blog Growth

Well, it is that time again! It has been almost 6 months since the last State of the Blogosphere, and so the team at Technorati and I have put together some high level information on what we've been tracking. Today I'll focus on the macro growth of the blogosphere, both in the number of bloggers out there, as well as in the growth of new blogs per day. You can compare the chart below to the charts from October 2004 and March 2005.

Cumulative number of Weblogs Tracked by Technorati

As of the end of July 2005, Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links. Interestingly, this is just about double the number of blogs that we were tracking 5 months ago. In March 2005 we were tracking 7.8 million blogs, which means the blogosphere has just about doubled again in the past 5 months, and that the blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months.

MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, as well as a number of international hosted services are growing quickly, and use of software like WordPress and Movable Type to provide blogs continue to grow significantly. There's a growing number of WordPress-based hosted services that are arising, including Laughing Squid, Dreamhost, and Blue Host, marking an interesting trend - that of ISPs and hosting providers using the GPL'ed software as a differentiating feature of their services. Moblogging sites like Textamerica and Buzznet have also been growing as well, as more people are blogging from their camera-enabled mobile phones. Growth has not only occurred in the US, but there has been a lot of blog growth in Japan, Korea, China, France, and Brazil, to name a few countries.

Here's a view of the number of new blogs created each day that Technorati is tracking, even after removing spam blogs (more on that later in the week) from our index:

Slide0004-2

You can see the charts from March 2005 and November 2004 to get an idea of how this is increasing, although all the data is included on the chart above. Technorati is now tracking about 80,000 new weblogs being created every day, which means a new weblog is created about every second. About 55% of all blogs are considered active - that is, 55% of all weblogs have had a posting in the last 3 months. In addition, 13% of all weblogs (currently 1.8 Million blogs) update at least weekly.

Interestingly, the activity statistics have remained remarkably consistent over time - In November 2004, we reported that 55% of all blogs were active, which is just about the same number as are active today. I think that this shows that even as the blogosphere is growing at a geometric pace, the "stickiness" of the tools and the willingness to write hasn't changed much at all.

Summary:

  • Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
  • The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
  • A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
  • About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
  • About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

Tomorrow I'll give an update on posting volume, which is a better statistic to track the growth of blogging. Lots of people who start new blogs are kicking tires and thus the numbers displayed above could be indicative of a fad in progress - but watching the posting volume shows how many people are actually blogging on a day-by-day basis. I think that is a much better indicator that people are making blogging a habit and a part of their daily lives. Later in the week I'll also describe the rise of tags, the increase in spam (or fake) blogs and SEO, and give an update on the relative influence of blogs compared to the mainstream media.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by dsifry at August 1, 2005 06:20 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Hey dave! Great post.

I commented over on my new blog:

http://www.feedblog.org/2005/08/technorati_stat.html

Posted by: Kevin Burton at August 1, 2005 08:15 PM

So every second somebody is creating a new blog. Wow I wonder what they eat for breakfast.

Posted by: spacemonkey at August 1, 2005 09:40 PM

I'd be curious to know what an average/mean "half-life" of a blog is. For those blogs that are considered inactive (how many months without a new post is that? 1? 2? 6?), how long did it take them to get there?

Another interesting number to see would be the posting frequency over time for active blogs versus those that end up being inactive.

Do people who post frequently in the beginning end up giving up ("blog burnout"™ ;)), while those who pace themselves last longer? (turtle & hare)

Posted by: Otis at August 1, 2005 10:20 PM

"o people who post frequently in the beginning end up giving up ("blog burnout"? ;)), while those who pace themselves last longer? (turtle & hare)"

Yups that would be an interesting fact to know.
Anyways thanks for current "state of art" David.

Posted by: Nakul at August 2, 2005 03:22 AM

Thanks for the update, David.

Curious if you have any thoughts on Om Malik's post on Technorati tags being used by blog spam farms. I assume all the blog search services are seeing some of this. Curious on your take on this potential trend.

I've got a post on it on my site. Thanks.

Posted by: michael parekh at August 2, 2005 05:35 AM

Interesting stats.

BTW: I am interested to know how you identify spam blogs without human intervention?

Posted by: Angsuman Chakraborty at August 2, 2005 07:26 AM

As usual I must say that I find these numbers to be inflated. The amount of blogs created for spam purposes is rather high. Technorati results are still full of spam. Just search for any of the widely spammed terms in technorati, and you will find allot of blog spam.
Looking at newly created blogs on google's blogger a couple of weeks ago there were 5 spam blogs for every real one.


Posted by: Andreas Wacker at August 2, 2005 11:20 AM

We did a study of the popularity of differnt blog hosting systems based on data we mined from Technorati. see http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=280 for the details.

Posted by: Tim Finin at August 2, 2005 01:00 PM

Good post. Like many others, I'm eagerly looking forward to what you have to say about both spam blogs and comment spam ...

My most urgent question, however, is: how are you going to scale Technorati so that it is actually a usable tool?

I'm sure you know the problems better than I - searches that take forever, and then return a "server too busy" message, etc. etc. This is critical, and with the major search engines about to pounce on the blogging space, getting better might be a matter of life or death for Technorati.

Posted by: John Koetsier at August 2, 2005 01:44 PM

If the blogosphere continues to double every 5.5 months, then some time in 2009 every man, woman and child in the world will have their own blog.

Posted by: Tim Finin at August 2, 2005 01:45 PM

I've written my own blogging script in PHP, complete with Technorati tagging and a Ping Technorati link. But Technorati never picks up any of my tags! My HTML is XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant, I've signed up for Technorati and claimed my blog, all the ingredients are in place. But my blog never shows up in Technorati.

Posted by: Peter S. Cornad at August 2, 2005 01:52 PM

It was tortoise and hare, not turtle! (Turtle is a sea creature.) There's no need for burnout - lots have been blogging daily or near daily since last century. Looking forward to learning about spam blogs, as until now I'd never heard of them.

Posted by: Peter at August 3, 2005 05:15 AM

If you click on the "Next Blog" button of Blogger a dozen times or so, you will find so-called blogs that are really just infomercials for some product or service.

Posted by: Douglas at August 3, 2005 01:33 PM

Where do you get this information?

Posted by: Yongshin Yu at August 3, 2005 02:27 PM

I'm from Chili...
my interest: Science

Posted by: jlvegapi at August 3, 2005 10:10 PM

According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are 938,710,929 users of internet around the world, assuming a relation 1-1 of user-blog, then 14.2 million blogs means 1.51% of bloggers!!

What is the ratio blogs/user ? 1, 1.5, 2, 3? I have registered at least 4 blogs in technorati. This stats is important.

Also, do you know how many bytes are in average per post?

Thanks.

Posted by: Eduardo Diaz at August 4, 2005 12:39 AM

I noticed the spike on the graph of new blogs per day around January 2005. Maybe a lot of people made a new years resolution to start a blog of their own.

Posted by: steve at August 5, 2005 02:41 PM

Questo post č disponibile in italiano al seguente indirizzo:
http://blog.nicolamattina.it/?p=132

Posted by: Nicola Mattina at August 16, 2005 03:45 AM

Very interesting news about the current status of blogging.

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