At least 360,000 Australian blogs: report
Duncan Riley> At long last there has been some public acknowledgement of the number of blogs in Australia, with the Australian Newspaper’s Media Section today reporting that MSN Spaces has 100,000 Australian bloggers and a reported market share of blogs in Australia of 28.3%.
The market share figure comes from Hitwise, a pay site similar to Neilson Netratings, which tracks various market segments on the net.
Whilst I have doubts as to the accuracy of the figures, mainly because alleged “Australian” sites are normally tracked on the basis of a .com.au domain and therefore usually ignore the many Australian sites and bloggers that utilise the .com domain (Google is a great example of this), the figures would translate into around 360,000 blogs in Australia.
As I have no intention of paying to obtain the blogging stats from Hitwise I have no way of verifying their methodology, and whether the figures include sites such as LiveJournal, which currently has over 85,000 Australian bloggers registered with the service, or even Google’s Blogger for example. Given that I know that wouldn’t be counting sites such as The Blog Herald or even Problogger.net in their stats, and the huge number of smaller blog players in the States that may have Australian users, I’m going to take a punt and say there are probably around 500,000 bloggers in Australia, which with 13.5 million internet users would put use at around 3.7%, still below US figures but catching up.
Update: although I actually physically viewed the report in hardcopy (yes I read the Oz everyday) its also available online here.