State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
Yes, 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
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