By George Kittredge
The answer to this question in one word - BIG - and its getting bigger. But to give you an idea as to the size of the blogosphere, here are some statistics that may interest you.
Both Blog World Expo and Technorati report that there are over 70 million blogs in existence today. But even as I write this, the number is rapidly increasing. Blog World also reports that an unbelievable 120,000 blogs are being created every day - so we are adding over 3 million new blogs every month.
As for business blogs, the same report noted that 89% of companies surveyed said they think blogs will be more important in the next five years - so it appears that, at least on the professional level, blogs still have quite a bit of room to grow. It would be interesting to find out what the other 11% plan to do - obviously not much on the world wide web.
Technorati also had some interesting stats to share in their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. Here are some of their findings.
In answer to the question, "who are the bloggers?", Technorati found that:
- approximately three out of every five bloggers (world wide) have been blogging for more than two years,
- two-thirds of the bloggers are male (This figure surprised me. However, with some further digging, I found that outside of the United States, male bloggers outnumber female bloggers 3 to 1. In the U.S., males account for 57% to 43% for females. I also suspect that the female percentage is the U.S. will increase over the next few years.),
- bloggers, on average, have been blogging for approximatedly three years, and
- 12% of bloggers blog in an official capacity for their company.
Regarding the most popular blogging languages, the most recent report I could find again came from Technorati and was dated June of 2007. This study concluded that the top four blogging languages were:
- Japanese at number one with 37% of all blogs.
- English second at 33%.
- Chinese a distant third with only 8%.
- Italian at fourth with 3%.
That left 19% to be split up by all of the other languages of the blogging world.
In September 2008, Technorati reported that a study done by Universal McCann found that 184 million people, world wide, have started a blog, including over 26 million (14.3%) in the U.S.
That same month Technorati conducted a survey from more than 1.2 million bloggers. From the results of this survey, they concluded that:
- 7.4 million blogs had published at least one post in the previous 120 days.
- 1.5 million had posted in the last 7 days, and
- 900,000 had posted in the last 24 hours.
That equates to approximately 10 1/2 posts published every second. But it also shows that only 20% of blogs are updated on a frequent (at least once per week) basis. The general rule for successful blogs is to be updated two to three times per week.
So the next time you publish a post, consider that quite likely 10 other people have published a post at the exact same time, but that only three of them may be in English. And also know that you have just made your contribution in becoming one of the almost 1 million updaters for that day.
Yes, the blogosphere is growing bigger every day and becoming a communication tool of choice on both a personal and professional level.
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