Blog Growth Statistics
Recently, the Blogging World as a whole reached a new milestone. Technorati, famous for indexing the blogosphere en masse, has finally surpassed the 3 million blog limit. This is reminiscent of the days of past when the leading search engines were indexing anew and boasting of the millions of web pages that they were already indexing.
Anyone who was awake during that time had a sense that things were growing, and it the mega-buzz of the 90's didn't help to overly amplify the growth and potential of the medium, I don't know what could have. Ironically enough, back then, we had to idea how bad the buzz was, nor how much the Internet had really arrived.
Looking at today, it seems we're entering another boom period. Of course, there are a few key differences that are apparent:
Money - Though we're seeing capital flow into this space, it is certainly not nearly as dizzying or frenzied as the DotBomb period was. This is incredibly encouraging as temperament was the key component missing from the first Internet Stew.
Organization - Previously, ideas and concepts were being organized from the top down. Lots of MBA brats and top brass were jumping off or into the pit and trying to make the rain they so needed. Today, we're seeing several bottom-up forces at play. There's the ever-growing and popular open source movement that is creating stunning software that still baffles some of the biggest gorillas. In addition, we've got regular citizens evolving into outlets, some even generating revenue early in the game. Imagine that there are countless bloggers that have already profited more than many publicly traded companies of yesteryear.
Quality - Let's face it, in the 90's there were some outright stupid ideas being funded with serious money. I won't name names, but you know who you are. Today, we're seeing something quite different emerging. Audiences of 1 seem to be enough to fund the development of thoughts, business, and interaction. Bloggers are writing because they want to, and about the things they want to. People are tuning in - in droves, including the big media and other outlets that should/would otherwise scowl. People are starting to get attached in ways never seen before.
To round this up, I'll point to some amazing statistics that Joi Ito recently pointed out.
On an average weekday, we're seeing over 15,000 new weblogs created per day. That means that a new weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds.
Of course, not all weblogs that are created are actively updated. Even though abandonment rates are high - our analyses show that about 45% of the weblogs we track have not had a post in over 3 months we are still tracking a significant population of people who are posting each day. The number of conversations are increasing. We're seeing over 275,000 individual posts every day. That means that on average, more than 3 blogs are updated every second. The median time from when someone posts something to their weblog to when it is indexed and available for searches on Technorati is 7 minutes. And we're striving to handle the load. But to be perfectly frank, it isn't easy. We've had some bugs and some outages - and for that I am truly sorry. I don't think the service is fast enough or stable enough. So, stability and fast response time is job #1, over new features and product developments. It has to work, 100% of the time.