How big is the blogosphere?

filed under Business of Blogging · 3 comments in the original

Elise Bauer has released an in-depth analysis of the blogging world and attempted to prop up a meter stick along side things to see just how big this "blogging thing" really is. The background information is well-written and thought out, but the rankings require more digging, which she openly acknowledges.

Elise's approach to evaluating market dominance relies on Google's indexing to count the number of sites linking back to it. As she describes:

One way to look at it may be to consider which tools have the most influence, or are getting the most use. To try to get an answer to this question I’ve turned to Google. By typing in the domain name of a tool you can find the number of web pages that link to the domain name and the number of pages that contain the search term of that domain name.

[...]

Since actual share numbers are impossible to come by, I have combined the Google Link To and Contain URL numbers to come up with what I am calling the Weblog Use Index, an index of market influence based solely on Google results. Clearly a problem with this approach is that it weighs more heavily the hosted services where each weblog created contains the URL of the service. Weblogs that use the standalone tools may not cite the tool used and therefore would not get counted with this method. However, when we look at the overall results, they seem to fit what we would expect in general. Blogger, Google’s free service, has the lion’s share, followed by Live Journal, the most active weblog online community.

Source: elise.com, "An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market" via Strategic Public Relations

I had many objections to the use of Google, but Phil Wolff, always quick on the gun, has jotted down the bulk of them. As Phil identifies, there are many reasons that the Google numbers might be skewed:

Strong vs. Weak Template Branding

Ping Power

Per-Post-Privacy

Family Plans

Built-In Search

SEO'd Templates

Off-Brand Software

Source: blogcount, "Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad have 68% GoogleShare"