Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Technorati's Active Blogs -- Perhaps 1.4 Million?


Another observation about Technorati's claim of 50 million blogs:

I recently created a new blog as an experiment. It only has two posts and as far as I can tell no one has linked to it. It's only be read by one or two people. Technorati's rank has it at somewhere around 1.4 million. So if a new blog that has virtually no exposure or usage is #1.4 million, one could conclude there are about this many active blogs in Technorati's logs. Further underscoring my point that most of its "50 million" are inactive (or splogs).

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am still surprised that people really think that the 30M or 50M number is anything close to what reality is.
Just realizing that I personally signed up for about 8 or more blog services, just to test them out when they were launched, to see if I like them.. that means that there are 8 blogs counted that I even I never visit.
I would estimate that well over 70% of the published number are real blogs are not active at all (probably experiments or one time attempts) and would further estimate that over 70% (that is a VERY optimistic measure imho) of the blogs are splogs. If 50M is the counted number, that means 30% at best are real blogs (15M) and out of which 30% are really cared for blogs - making the total to less than 5M.
How many of whoch are blogs that are posted in more than several times until the owner finds something better to do? I don't know.
I would love to know the real number of blogs that are active - which means for me at least five (which is the bare minimum really) posts a month. If it surpasses 1 million I would be shocked.
At that is before talking about the value of the content ;)

Glenn Fannick said...

So David, can you tell us how many of Technorati's blogs are "active" and how do you define "active"? I've seen many comments recently asking that question, but I've not come across your answer if you've posted on.

Anonymous said...

Glen,

One thing to note about Technorati's ranking is that all blogs at the same rank (i.e. with the same stats) get the same number. So your blog is just one of many with the 1.4M rank. All this number tells you is that there are >1.4 M blogs with no links. Link counts, of course, don't tell you how active a blog is.

Glenn Fannick said...

David,
Thanks for answering my question publicly. One followup: The most recent issue of Wired (not posted online yet) states that there are about 300,000 legit posts a day to the Blogosphere. That would be 27 million legit posts every 90 days (a fairly modest number). You say that 55% of your tracked blogs, or approx 28 million blogs, post at least once every 90 days. Considering those two stats that would mean virtually no blogger is posting more than once a quarter. Obviously not correct. So is Technorati saying Wired is way off with the size of the legit Blogosphere or am I missing something?
Glenn

Glenn Fannick said...

That Wired article on Splogs is now posted online.

Anonymous said...

Hard to believe there are 50m+ blogs.

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