State of the Blogosphere 8-7-06

Posted on August 7, 2006

Technorati has posted a new State of the Blogosphere report. Technorati is now tracking 50 million blogs and the amount of blogs Technorati is tracking is now 100 times larger than it was just 3 years ago. In July there were 175,000 new weblogs created each day or over 2 blogs created each second of each day. Technorati's CEO David Sifry notes that this torrid growth cannot continue forever.

Technorati has been tracking the blogosphere, or world of weblogs, since November 2002, and I'm constantly amazed at the growth over the years. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
Whenever I write about these statistics, I'm always asked by people, "Can it continue to grow this quickly?" Frankly, I can't possibly imagine it continuing to grow at this pace - after all, there are only so many human beings in the world! It has to slow down.

There are even less human beings capable of blogging and all of the blog-able people are not going to blog.

Things have gotten spamier. 70% of the pings Technorati receives are now spam. It looks like blog spam is rapidly headed in the same direction email took but faster. A recent study found 95% of email is spam.

This graph provided Technorati is always one of the most interesting from the State of the Blogosphere reports. It shows incidents which led to big spikes in the number of blog posts. The latest spike occured when the Israel-Lebanon War began. There was another spike in May for the National Spelling Bee.

Here are the summary highlights of the report provided by Technorati's CEO David Sifry.

Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.