As David Sifry says, another quarter another State of the Blogosphere report from Technorati.  The Blogosphere is still growing at a six month doubling rate.  There is roughly a new blog created every second and about 50,000 posts per hour.  Holey smokes!  The logical question to this extreme growth would be "yeah, but how many blogs are just abandoned?"  Great question.  According to this latest report 55% are still active 3 months down the line (up from 50.3% in the last report).

Of course all good news has its bad to go with it.  As will e-mail, once something becomes popular the spammers and scammers are soon to jump on the bandwagon.  In fact today (April 17th) seems to be one of the spam storm days (sporm) where lots of blogs are getting hammered with spam comments and trackbacks.  However, while I agree with Matt Mullenweg that spam is a real problem and a potential rate limiting factor on the growth of real blogs, I also think because it is so high-profile and is one instance where the major blog hosts and platform developers are working together, I hope that this issue will be kept in check.  Come on would you really want to go up against folks like Ross Rader and Matt Mullenweg in a programming contest?  Pass.

Mark Evans comments on this report and hits the nail on the head on potential business aspects of the rapid growth of the Blogosphere:

While Sifry's take on the blogosphere provides an intriguing snapshot of what's happening, it will be far more interesting to see how the business of blogs evolves this year. The Centre for Media Research recently published a forecast of advertising growth on blogs over the next five years - see my post here. As more advertising gravitates to the blogosphere, most of it will likely flow to Big Media blogs and blog networks such as John Battelle's Federated Media. It will also be interesting to see the growth of podcasts and video-blogs as the tools to create them become even more user-friendly. As much as Rocketboom.com has attracted a lot of publicity (it doesn't hurt that Amanda Congdon has become the Lara Croft of the blogosphere), its novelty will soon disappear as more people start making vblogs. All in all, it's going to be an interesting year in the blogosphere.

Ads by AdGenta.comI don't entirely agree with Mark on his assessment.  While I agree that more and more advertising will start to heading to blogs, and the major blog networks will start getting more attention, the majority of bloggers aren't going to be in blog networks.  Easy and profitable advertising solutions for individual bloggers also represent a serious growth segment on the adavertiso-sphere (not bad for a new word, eh?)

David Sifry sums up the news like this:

  • 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

Mark Evans and I both agree that the rapid and accelerating growth on the Blogosphere will make it extremely attractive to advertisers this year.  As Mark said, looks like it's going to be an interesting year.

See also: Neville tech.memeorandum

Tags: , , , , , ,