Below are highlights from the recent two part “State of the Blogosphere” Report by David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati. Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.
From part 1:
- Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs.
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half 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
- 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created.
- Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives.
- Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated.
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour.
From part 2:
- Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger’s and reader’s minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the “big head” of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.
- Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media.
- Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.
- There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.
- Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low – in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as the blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.
Here’s an NYT article that talks about the report.