World wide blog count for May: now over 60 million blogs

World Wide Web

Attention Slashdot Readers: the latest Blog Herald Blog Count is available here (July) for those interested.

Duncan Riley> Time for another count which I was saving for a few weeks, but after A list blogger Steve Rubel, who should have known better, asked whether the latest Japanese blogging figures were reflected in the 11 million in Blogpulse, and also said that somebody should provide a country break down on the number of blogs (which I’ve been doing nearly month since January) here we go.

The good news in this report is that we have some better numbers to go by coming out of Asia, although the breakdown in the Anglosphere is still based on operator numbers and not by country

Anglosphere
US/ Canada/ UK/ Australia/ NZ

Google: 8.5 million
according to Persus + 500,000 growth in 6 weeks which is an educated guess, probably more

MSN Spaces: 10 million
7 million at 21 April with reported growth of 100,000 blogs per day. I’ve called it 10 million which allows for a small decline in growth, however the growth was being fuelled by the new version of IM which normally takes several months for everyone to update, so I can see that the growth will be maintained for at least some time, but not the longer term. We won’t know for sure until Microsoft gives a new update on the figures

Six Apart Live Journal/ TypePad/ MT: 8.7 million
from LJ 25May (7.2m) + SixApart claimed 1.2 million for MT and TypePad when it acquired LJ allows for 300,000 conservative growth figure for MT and TypePad, 100,000 more from 6 weeks ago

Other hosted (US): 9 million
perseus
we still don’t have figures for AOL, Lycos or Yahoo 360!, so there may be more again, but given the approximations on growth elsewhere we’ll leave them in the other hosted figure.

I’d note that we also know that there are at least 360,000 Australian blogs, but probably closer to 500,000. This is included in the Anglosphere total. I’ve been told there are at least 700,000 UK bloggers, but am unable ot confirm the figure, this would be mainly in the Anglosphere total

Sub Total: 36.2 million

Asia
Japan: 3.35 million blogs
confirmed here first through a Japan Today report and now by Steve Rubel 3 days later.

China: 4 million
NY Times 24 May

South Korea: 15 million
new reports are still difficult to get out of South Korea, so I’m using the same figure as last month. Give how high it is a can’t see a huge amount of growth left in South Korea for blogs.

Other Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Phillipines): approx 1 million
mixed reports and no firm figures so again I’ve stuck with last months figures. What I have managed to stumble on to is some really good blogs coming out of these countries and vibrant blogging communities, but alas no figure.

India/ Pakistan: approx 1 million
no firm figures however I’ve noticed a significant rise out of India recently, and certainly the Indian press is also reporting on the emergence of Indian blogs, which is a sure sign that there must be a reasonable number there.

Sub Total: 24.35 million

Europe
France: 1.5 million
The figure is at least 1.5 million on French blogger service Skyblog, its potentially larger but I know that some French bloggers will use Anglosphere services like Blogger and Spaces.

I don’t have figures for other countries, but I do know a lot of European bloggers use US based services (Livejournal, blogger etc). So we’ll say 500,000 for the rest which use services outside of the Anglosphere which are not counted elsewhere.

See Also
MacBook Air beside gold-colored study lamp and spiral books

Sub Total: 2 million

Middle East
Iraq: at least 151
Iraqi blog count as at 25 May

Others: approx 100,000?
In the Middle East I’m including Israel, which although may compete in the Eurovision song contests looks like being in the Middle East on my map. I’d hazard to guess that the bulk of the blogs are in Israel, and I’ve had the opportunity of email chatting with a few Israeli bloggers recently, one of whom was building a Gawker style network in Hebrew.

Africa: 10,000+
Insignificant numbers although there are a few blogs appearing in South Africa

TOTAL: 62.66 million blogs

Notes to figures: where possible figures have been referenced or shown as to how they have been calculated. The figures indicate the total number of blogs, not the total number of bloggers or live blogs, in a similar way that Technorati and similar services do. By all means feel free to comment, but please dont start a discussion on how may are “active” or not, its an important discussion but this tally is not the place. As always if anyone has newer figures on any countries please let me know.

Update: SixApart LiveJournal has been described by Mosnews.com as Russia’s most popular blogging service. Given the figures are already in the SixApart figures there is nothing to add to the overall count, however there are 165,000 Russian bloggers on LJ, so I’ll call the total for Russia at around 200,000 blogs.

Further Update: Indian figure has been given a 100,000 in this report. Given I called the over all figure at “above 60 million” I wont adjust things. Interestingly the report quotes one of my earlier counts, then refers to another blog that points to my next world blog count.

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