State of the Blogosphere 2008: Technorati Numbers Indicate Blogging Is Niche and Slowing
Technorati says blogging is mainstream, we think the numbers indicate otherwise.
Blog search engine and ad network Technorati released its 5th annual State of the Blogosphere report and the numbers are quite interesting. Technorati says its findings indicate that blogging is now mainstream. We're not so sure. Although reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream, is writing them?
Popularity of Blogging
In 2004, the first year Technorati issued a State of the Blogosphere report, the company said it was tracking 4 million blogs. By October of 2005 that number had risen to 19.6 million and between 2% and 8% of new blogs created each day were judged to be fake or spam blogs. In April of 2007 that number was up to 70 million blogs that the company had effectively indexed and today the number is up to to 133 million total blogs indexed since the company started indexing blogs. So the number nearly doubled in the last year.
Of those 133 million blogs that Technorati has indexed - guess how many of them have been posted to in the last 7 days? 1.1% of them, or 1.5 million total.
Just for context, 1.6 million people in the US have defaulted on their mortgages last year. In 2005 there were 1.6 million people around the world who could speak Esperanto. 1.6 million people went to the Minnesota State Fair last year.
Is blogging mainstream? Globally, fewer people are posting to their blogs each week than go to the Minnesota State Fair or speak Esperanto. Maybe the impact of blogging on media is comparable to the economic impact of an equivalent number of people defaulting on their mortgages, but that would be a pretty drastic statement to make.
Trying to blog (as 130 million+ people have in the past 6 years) may be somewhat mainstream, but actually blogging does not seem to be so yet.
Demographically - Is This Representative?
What's the stereotype of a blogger in mainstream media? They (we) are underemployed, marginally educated loners with tiny rabid audiences. How do the results of Technorati's survey of bloggers work out relative to that? Add disproportionately well-off and you'd hit the nail on the head.
Only 56% of bloggers in the US report that they have a full time job. 74% of them are college graduates and 51% have an annual household income of over $75,000. We're not sure how that works, but the old trope of living in mom and dad's basement doesn't seem an entirely unrealistic explanation.
The average number of monthly unique visitors reported by these bloggers? In the US it's only 18,000. That means 600 people per day. 600 people reading your thoughts each day is pretty fabulous for the vast majority of people on the planet, but as media goes it's not very mainstream. Especially if there are only a million and a half people doing it.
Blogging Appears to Be Slowing Down
This year's report finds that there are on average 900,000 blog posts created every 24 hours. In last year's report that number was 1.5 million and in 2006 it was 1.3 million. 2005's report from Technorati didn't include this number and 2004's report put it at 400,000 posts per day.
2004: 400,000 blog posts per day.
2005: ?
2006: 1.3 million blog posts per day
2007: 1.5 million blog posts per day
2008: 900,000 blog posts per day
Technorati says it has culled a large number of spam blogs out of its index this year, but it's focused extensively on spam blogs every year. The evidence seems fairly clear - blogging is slowing down.
Is Any of This Something to Be Ashamed of?
No! The fact that publishing is opening up to millions more people around the world is a beautiful thing. The fact that many of them report being well-to-do and underemployed at the same time is something to take into consideration but not a repudiation of the medium. The fact that only 1.5 million blogs around the world are updated as often as once a week does indicate that none of this has really stuck with large numbers of people, however.
Reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream and the line between a blog and another kind of website is growing increasingly blurred. Writing full length blog posts even as regularly as once a week is hard, though. We expect that microblogging may become more popular than blogging, if it hasn't already! From updating your status message on Facebook or MySpace, to posting 140 word updates on lunch or politics on Twitter to offering truncated public religious testimonials on a site like Gospelr (Twitter for Christians) - there are a whole lot of people already microblogging, if you will.
Our boss, RWW Founding Editor Richard MacManus, contributed this quote to the Technorati report: "The future of blogs will have arrived when you check your favorite blog for sports news in the morning, instead of your local paper." That's a whole different matter, though, than the writing of blogs becoming mainstream. Blogging may become centralized, profesionalized and increasingly scarce - just like other forms of media have, perhaps to a lesser degree.
Those Are Our Thoughts, What Are Yours?
The Technorati State of the Blogosphere is an incredible service and the data the company comes up with is very much appreciated. We hope you'll take a look at it and share some of your thoughts.
Our analysis above is centered almost entirely on the US portion of the numbers, as well. We'd love to read some thoughts from our international readers about the differences in numbers between US bloggers and those in Europe and Asia. African and Latin American bloggers and blog readers - we'd love to know how the lay of the land looks in your neck of the woods relative to these numbers as well.
We love blogs and we love blogging. Even if we don't believe that blog writing is mainstream yet, or maybe that it ever will be, we appreciate the opportunity to look at this cultural force in a quantitative way.
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Off the top of my head, lots of younger folks are using their social network profiles as blogs (MySpace, Nexopia, etc). These might not be counted in the stats, and may represent some level of defection from hosted blog sites.
Not sure if that impacts the numbers in any meaningful way...
What is a blog nowadays ? A immense amount of content is now available as a stream organised along a timeline, most often with a way to interact by commenting. The blogging meme has spread and evolved, influencing the whole online medium and at the same time diluting into other forms. We now have a continuum ranging from purely discursive micro-blogging to feature length articles through link blogs, picture blogs and what we can with hindsight qualify as traditional blogging. Is a blog something that Technorati defines and indexes as a blog ? I believe that this is a moot point : the production of information streams has gone mainstream, even if the proportion of the population that is capable of articulate journalistic writing remains more or less stable.
I think that there is a difference between bloggers and a blog. What I mean by that, is that blogs are quickly becoming a mainstream platform to build a generic website. Blogs are being built, but not for blogging. This would make the number of blogs increase, with no substantial change in the number of posts made. I would bet that if 2008 numbers are truly down, it may be just a weak year, and that is about it. I would still expect an increase the following year.
I agree that blogging is a mature industry. People have experimented with everything from Movable Type to Blogger to Myspace. Some stick - some go to Twitter or to Facebook or back offline.
No harm in slowing down.
Also, re the "average" of 600 readers per day. Perhaps we should use a median rather than mean average, to account for the indoubtedly massive long tail?
Technorati's site is down. Looks like *some* things don't change over time.
Posted by: Sprague D
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September 22, 2008 2:20 PM
I assume that they didn't count Microblogging / Twitter? It is a lot easier to Twitter every day than to write a thought-provoking blog post.
Checking blog posts every morning has replaced the morning paper for many of us already! The number of quality blogs has gone up and have worked there way into my daily routine, and that is a great thing.
In other words some 94% of blogs have not been updated in the last 120 days. This tells you how much of the "blog mania" is just that.
TO'B
This is a great quantitative analysis.
However, I think it's getting more "mainstreamed" than "niched". Case in the point: We were at Blog World Expo the other day and I was delighted to see couple of old (I mean really old!) media representatives stopping by and scouting technologies they can use on their in-the-works-social site. Works!
Indus
Did the study go into any of the reasons for the slowing growth of blog posts?
Where the same methods for weeding out spam posts used each year?
I wonder how much corporate blogging policies have played a roll in the decline?
Blogging is like the modern day gold rush. There was a time when a few picks and a shovel was enough to get started and gain some traction. But nowadays, many blogs have grown into media conglomerates with everything from full staffing to event hosting/sponsorship. It's become harder for the independent blogger to get noticed.
There's also probably a bit of blogger fatigue. Maybe as it turns out, friends and family aren't as interested in our daily or weekly output as we anticipated...are we aren't as interesting as we thought. Ha.
Thanks for this analysis, Marshall.
The idea that microblogging, Facebook, and other pursuits are siphoning off blogging time and energy makes intuitive sense to me. Historically it seems like it was quite common for people to write short blog posts with links to other material, in the original spirit of the weblog concept. Now Twitter, Facebook, tumblelogs, and lifestreaming make it very quick easy to do this, leaving blogs for more detailed writing, business concerns, and monetization.
I was quite surprised to see the male/female ratio to be more imbalanced outside of the US, though.
That's an interesting post. I just realized after reading it that I refer to my web site Pampelmoose.com as a blog when what I should be saying is that it is just that, a web site. It just happens to be built on the Wordpress platform. As for microblogging, I use FriendFeed and Tumblr to forward my web posts to my Facebook and Twitter account - microblogging while I sleep as it were...
This is one of the worst posts I've seen here. In the beginning you are comparing apples to oranges, if that.
Also, Technorati's incomplete statistics is not synonymous with good use of the scientific method to come to a logical conclusion that blogging is on the decline. Get some more sources or this blogs traffic will be on the decline.
Marshall, good thoughts. I think if anything, the Technorati study shows that "blogging" is not only a larger beast then it was a year ago, but also a blurrier one.
Marshall,
You've got some great insights on our survey data, though I'd have to ask: what's not mainstream about tens of millions of people reading blogs: in the US, 77 million unique visitors accoring to comScore and 94 million according to eMarketer. Those are huge audience numbers that absolutely make blogs mainstream media. I think you've confused one of the main points of the survey: it's not the absolute total number of blogs, but rather the tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of bloggers that are creating a relevant media experience for tens of millions of blog readers. That's what makes blogs mainstream -- the serious bloggers who are making real micro publishing (and some not so micro btw, like yourself). And on a related note, the people who read blogs are typically a higher value demo with better education and higher income, again making blogs a great and totally relevant media channel for marketers and advertisers. Blogs are media, not a fringe web 2.0 fad.
The "last 7 days" metric is interesting. I've been blogging and commenting for over ten years, but I occasionally break for weeks or months between activity. I think I'm a blogger, although I'm outside of that narrow definition.
Perhaps the "last 7 days" metric is a bit tight define someone as a blogger? Similarly, isn't it a bit of a stretch to compare a weekly occurrence to once-a-year events like the state fair? It's almost like saying you're not a real fairgoer unless you're a carny, and I hope to all things holy that 1.6 million carnies aren't descending upon Minnesota every year!
And one other note: today's release was the first of a five part series -- that's how much interesting data there is. So stay tuned and check out the other surevey topics!
@ Richard Jalichandra
Based on past report irregularity - why should we believe (and make serious decisions off of) these numbers? I don't think you've earned that trust.
Your index is still filled with spam, so your "cleaning" is suspect at best. Also are you still including big media sites? Your homepage still looks much, much more like a news aggregator than a blog search engine. When are you going to fix that?
What is your plan to give users a reason to come back and use blog search instead of having everyone read the same 10 blog feeds everyday or just reading the streams in Facebook, etc??? Inquiring minds would like to know. :)
@Dalka, you say: "why should we believe (and make serious decisions off of) these numbers? I don't think you've earned that trust."
I think Technorati has more than earned our trust to deliver these kind of statistics. It's been measuring the blogosphere right from the start, no other analytics company can say that.
@Richard Jalichandra (CEO - Technorati), you say: "Blogs are media, not a fringe web 2.0 fad."
I couldn't agree more! :-)
I do think it's important to make a distinction between writing blogs, which Marshall argues is on the decline, and reading them, which most agree is going mainstream. Marshall himself wrote that: "Reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream and the line between a blog and another kind of website is growing increasingly blurred."
Looking forward to the next instalment of the Technorati data...
I am with Frank as reading blogs is a massive part of my day now, I picked up a newspaper this morning but read through my feeds on Google Reader instead!
Posted by: Joe Dawson
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September 23, 2008 1:17 AM
Started to post something, decided it won't fit in the space provided. :P
Posted by: abacab
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September 23, 2008 1:34 AM
People write where they hope and believe they have an audience to listen and possibly respond to their thoughts. i.e vanity of the blogger
Right now the audience is now on Twitter and/or Facebook/Friendfeed, so that is where the conversation has moved. In the future it may move to video e.g Seesmic, Qik, Kyte
According to Techcrunch you need to have an audience of 100k to make £35k ($75k) - waste of time. A half decent young marketing person can earn that without all the pain and hassle of 18 hour days.
RRW is a great read and I appreciate the work that goes into each post but unless it is sold like PaidContent then does it pay enough to Richard and his team for the time and effort?
@ Richard MacManus
"@Dalka, you say: "why should we believe (and make serious decisions off of) these numbers? I don't think you've earned that trust."
I think Technorati has more than earned our trust to deliver these kind of statistics. It's been measuring the blogosphere right from the start, no other analytics company can say that."
Uhm, Richard, you seem to be forgetting that you're talking about a company that on most days, doesn't even count links accurately! How long somebody has done something has absolutely nothing to do with accuracy.
Web leaders are social networking,microblogging(blogging's kid),lifestreaming.Blogging is too massive now.
The problem with this kind of survey is in the fact that a lot of blogs (free blog platforms) are created without RSS feature. It means that the sites as Technorati cannot count those blogs (e.g. MySpace blogs).
For example, in the Balkans, several countries have the largest blogosphere situated in the free blog services without RSS feature (Bosnia, Croatia). Those bloggers are invisible for Technorati.
Are they bloggers, or not because they do not fave RSS on their blogs?
Congratulations. Most people do not realise that Esperanto's a living language!
If you have time an interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
Alternatively http://www.lernu.net might help?
The changes described in the posting entitled " 5th annual State of the Blogosphere report" may be illuminated by reading my paper— to be found at: http://artsandminds.typepad.com/artsandminds/2003/12/five_stages_in_.html
titled: "Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communication Channels" (as published on my blog http://artsandminds.typepad.com/ December 14, 2003)
I see two problems with these stats.
1. Technorati has become extremely unreliable. I don't know what they're doing all day long, but I have the feeling that technically they're screwed.
2. The Asian and Russian market: We still don't know how big this thing is, because we can't even read it.