Blogs Continue to Multiply

The bloated blogosphere?

It may seem hard to believe, but according to the "State of the Blogosphere" report issued in January by Technorati, there were 26.6 million blogs online.

Now the latest "State of the Blogosphere" report has upped the number to 35.3 million blogs, and Technorati's David Sifry claims that is a mind-blogging 60 times more blogs than existed three short years ago.

Well, almost.

Looking back at Technorati's own numbers, the blogosphere is only about 16 times as large as it was three years ago. But, to be fair, if you go back a few months earlier and compare with August 2003, the blogosphere is now more than seventy times larger than it was then.

Blogs tracked by Technorati Aug. 2003 - Aug. 2006

• Aug. 2003 = 500,000
• April 2004 = 2,300,000
• April 2005 = 9,400,000
• April 2006 = 35,300,000

Technorati claims over 75,000 new weblogs are created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day.

According to the latest report, 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still updating their sites three months after their blogs were created. That's an increase in both absolute and relative terms over January, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were 'active'. In addition, about 3.9 million bloggers currently update their blogs at least weekly.

As Mr. Sifry writes in his own blog, "In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity."

That statement is hard to argue with. Whether growth was actually 60 times or 16 times over the last three years, one thing is certain. There are a lot of blogs out there, and tomorrow there will be more.

For more information on blogs, read the eMarketer report, The Business of Blogging.