Duncan Riley> Recent figures being released and continued growth in the Blogosphere has led me to believe that despite some media groups still making claims that there are only 8 or 10 million blogs in existence the number is now higher than the 34.5 million blogs I calculated in January. (the notable exception being Melbourne’s The Age who misquoted my 1 billion posts being tracked by Technorati and wrote that I stated there were 100 million blogs in existence, a little premature, perhaps April 06?). Like January, this is not a scientific study but an informed guestimate based on evidence available.
Blogs in existence in April 2005: 50.75 million worldwide
What follows is how I came up with the figure.
Multinational Blogging Services
Google: 8 million
according to Persus
MSN Spaces: 5 million
Persus + Scoble
Six Apart Live Journal/ TypePad/ MT: 8.2 million
from LJ 14Apr (6.8m) + SixApart claimed 1.2 million for MT and TypePad when it acquired LJ which was 5.3m at the time, allows for 200,000 conservative growth figure for MT and TypePad)
Other hosted (US): 9 million
based on Persus study
WordPress: 250,000
at best an educated guess, over100,000 downloads of WP 1.5 and 266,000 links to WordPress on Google
Other DIY: 100,000
again, an educated guess, and this would include CMS packages that are utilising blogging plugins
By Region/ Country
I’d note that in the regional figures I’m excluding those who are using multinational services previously calculated (eg Blogger) and am only counting local services, which is different to how I calculated the figure back in January
Europe: 2 million
China: 2 million
various reports and feedback from users in China and interested in China. The blog market in China is still immature and is just starting to take off
Japan: 1 million
rough reports, I suspect the figure is higher
Korea: 15 million
Previous reports (see January post) I’ve revised it down slightly because I believe I over estimated the figure for Cyworld.
Rest of Asia, the Sub-Continent and Middle East: 1 million
again, educated guess, I know for example that there are thriving blog cultures emerging in Singapore and Malaysia, and that India is also showing growth, but given the lower penetration of computers in many of these countries its best to keep the figure low
South America: 1 million
Again, various reports, there is a thriving blogging community emerging in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, but again in terms of numbers is still rather low. There is also a number of local blogging services available as well
Africa: n/a
insignificant numbers, although there are a growing number of bloggers in South Africa.
Australia: (120,000)
not included in total figure because Australian bloggers nearly exclusively use the American and multinational services.
TOTAL: 50.75 million worldwide
Update: As per comments it’s remiss of me not to note that a significant portion of the blogs are most likely abondoned or spam blogs, or that the figures are not likely to be represented in actual bloggers (multiple blogs per blogger), however I do this exercise from time to time as a means of noting that many in the mainstream media continue to under report the number of blogs in existence and the aim of this post is to articulate a more accurate figure (although an educated guess) as to how many blogs are actually out there. I’d note as in January that the blogosphere also extends beyond the North American mainland, another fact often overlooked.
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