Dave's quoted as saying 30,000 - 40,000 new blogs a day. Also, given that there are 7 million blogs right now and that we've been doubling every five months for the last 20 months... if the trend continues we'd hit 14 million in 5 months and then 28 million in ten months. That's a wee bit different than Forbes estimate of 12 million in 2 years.
I wonder where Forbes gets there numbers? I mean even though it's been doubling every 5 months surely blog growth has to slow down at some point soon? But to slow down so much that we'll have only 12 million in two years. That's a little more radically conservative than Dave Sifry's are radically liberal.
It's impossible to believe it will continue at this rate for much longer. It's impossible to believe it's continued at this exponential growth rate this long though. I repeat again, for the last 20 months the blogosphere has been doubling in size every 5 months! Shiiite. That is nuts, if 10% or even 20% are spam blogs (which Dave says they've been very good at isolating out) it's still a crazy growth rate. I can't wait to look at Dave's latest numbers on the growth of blog posts. That's the true measure of growth. Not the number of blogs, but the number of blog posts! I'm sure it's much more conservative. Tune in in a half an hour when I'm finally done reading them. I'm sure they're already up now. ;)
From: :: Welcome to Manila Bulletin Online ::
With their accessibility and ease of use, blogs have risen to be ?the most democratizing force since the rise of the Internet itself,? notes Dan Farber in an article on techupdate.zdnet.com. In 1999, there were only 50 blogs in the blogosphere; now, there are more than 7 million listed on RSS search engine Technorati alone. With an estimated 23,000 blogs born everyday (according to Fortune), the number may reach as high as 12 million in a couple of years or so.
[...]
The blog, of course, is still morphing in form for as long as technological innovations allow it. Moblog or mobile blog seems to be slow in catching up in the Philippines but the December 2004 tsunami disaster has given rise to the so-called ?vlog? or video blogging which uses video as a blog post. Music lovers, meanwhile, have come up with the MP3 or audio blog where music files, most of them hard-to-find, are shared and made available for download.
The association of vlogging with the tsunami is weird. It's a sort of commen misconception, but really they had nothing to do with one other. Certainly regular bloggers passed around the majority of videos and would have done the same wether video blogs existed or not. Passing around a few videos on occassion does not make a blog a video blog. Otherwise we should stop calling the majority of blogs, blogs and start calling them all vlogs, because everyone passes around an occasional video. I don't even consider my own blog a vlog and I pass around lots of videos, lots and lots, but I don't create any of my own content. I only intermediate or blog about other peoples videos. Call it what you will, but personally my favorite vloggers are people who are more creative than I. As in actually make new content! ;)
1 comment:
Great post, Michael. There are nearly 12 million bloggers in South Korea alone. If the numbers seem large, you need to compare them to other common behaviors. What percentage of people use mobile phones? IM? Email?
Even Google doesn't claim to have mapped at all the web. Part of the rapid growth at Technorati is just discovering new areas of the blogosphere. "I mapped 3 square miles of the ocean, twice as much as last year" doesn't tell you much about the size of the ocean, just the size of the mapped ocean.
More on blogospheric stats at http://Blogcount.com.
Blog on.
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