It's Getting Harder and Harder to See the Edges

filed under Crossover

I won’t bother you with the blur that is my life (not yet anyway) but it’s worth pointing out three key sets of data that have come about in the last couple of weeks that show us just how fast the universe we call home is expanding.

State of the Blogosphere

Well, if there was any question, it’s answered. There’s more and more blogs in the world every second of every day. Dave Sifry gives us the first installment of his State of the Blogosphere. Here are the summary bullets:

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

Podcasting Market Update

This subset of the whole social media world is growing like mad. Despite reports that no one's listening, there's plenty of people making stuff it seems. Feedburner, the mavericks of RSS tracking, report they are managing more than 44,000 podcast feeds - wow. But there's more:

FeedBurner alone manages more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide (yep, we looked it up)
Podcasting is outpacing the speed of adoption of the last "most successful consumer product launch in history" (more on that in a minute)
Podcast directories are growing, and driving activity back to podcasters' originating Web sites. As we saw with text feeds, distribution begins as a mechanism to drive traffic back to the originating source and then evolves to become its own consumption medium

Alternative Media Outlook Looks Promising

A little week back or so, PQ Media made waves as they released their new study that took a look at the future of Alternative Media (you know, blogging, podcasting, RSS). As someone who’s building a company around monetizing this sort of content, it was encouraging to see some numbers (mostly since investor-types get excited by this).

The Center for Media Research leaks some of the details from the Executive Summary:

User-generated media remains primarily national in scope with 98.1%, or $20.0 million, of all advertising spending coming from the broader market in 2005
Advertising networks and click-throughs are the largest ad insertion methods, generating $8.0 million and $7.8 million, respectively
Blog advertising accounted for 81.4%, or $16.6 million, of total spending on user-generated online media in 2005, but blog ads will comprise only 39.7%, or $300.4 million, of overall spending in 2010
Podcast advertising totaled only $3.1 million in 2005, but is projected to reach $327.0 million in 2010, when it will account for 43.2% of all user-generated media advertising
Spending on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) advertising totaled $650,000 in 2005 and will grow to $129.6 million in 2010
Total spending on user-generated online media is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 106.1% from 2005 to 2010, reaching $757.0 million in 2010

With all this news, it makes me wonder how long you can deny that things are changing in ways we didn’t necessarily anticipate. We used to talk about this thang as life on the edges. Maybe Stowe’s had it right all along - the edge is folding in on the center.