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Millions of blogs go unread |
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Written by Patrick T. Reardon, MCT
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Tuesday, 13 November 2007 |
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The number of blogs worldwide is growing by leaps and bounds. But, as popular as blogging is today, most blogs don't have anyone reading them, said Derek Gordon, vice president for marketing for the San Francisco-based Technorati, the Internet search engine for searching blogs, in an e-mail exchange.
Q: Your site says you're tracking 109.2 million blogs. That's up from the 94 million blogs that you were tracking in August. In other words, the number of blogs you track increased by 16 percent over a two-month period. Is that accurate?
A: That is accurate.
Q The figure of 109.2 million blogs means there is one blog for every 151 people (based on the July 2007 estimate of 6.6 billion people). It also means that there is one blog for every 23 people with Internet access (based on the May 2007 estimate by eMarketer that more than 1 billion people use the Web). Do you have any idea how soon there will be one blog for every person on Earth with Internet access?
A: I don't. Remember that most blogs are only marginally active (that is, about one blog post a month), and most are used for personal journaling purposes. Also remember that about 25 percent of active bloggers (that is, people who post to their blogs at least once a week) actually maintain more than one blog.
Q: Is there some cutoff in the future that will mean we never get to that one-to-one situation?
A: It is likely that the number of registered blogs will one day exceed the number of people who have Internet access, but one cannot extrapolate that, therefore, each of those persons actually has and uses a blog. The combination of spam blogs and individuals with multiple blogs means that the total volume of registered blogs will easily, one day, exceed even the total number of people on Earth, even if only some fraction of those people are, in fact, bloggers.
Q: What percentage of the 109.2 million blogs are "spam blogs," or splogs, set up purely to impact search-engine results?
A: Technorati, Google and others have an aggressive program of identifying and removing spam blogs so the overall percentage of spam blogs tracked versus legitimate blogs remains largely in check. At any given moment, we estimate that 5 to 15 percent of the blogs we're tracking are spam blogs. At this point, we estimate that between 3,000 and 7,000 new splogs are created every day. They are mostly link farms with various nefarious ends designed to both game ranking systems and to get unsuspecting folks to click into sites that have dubious/illegal monetization schemes.
Q: Any idea how many of the 109.2 million blogs you track get no hits in the course of a year?
A: Just over 99 percent. The vast majority of blogs exist in a state of total or near-total obscurity. | Only registered users can write comments.
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