Opinion: Only 3 percent of blogs are updated regularly, according to a recent report, and the big blogs are pushing smaller blogs down the long tail.Technorati CEO Dave Sifry published his latest
State of the Blogosphere report, and the results are pretty astounding to say the least. To wit:
- The blogosphere is more than 100 times bigger than it was just three years ago.
- Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every six and a half months.
- From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every five to seven months.
- About 175,000 new blogs are created each day, which means that on average, there are more than two blogs created each second of each day.
- Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
- This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
- The most prevalent times for English-language posting are between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5 p.m. Pacific time.
"But what about the spam blogs?" you might be asking if you're a savvy reader. Well, Technorati controls that in the numbers. While 70 percent of the pings Technorati receives are from spam sources, its algorithm controls that to the point that only 8 percent of splogs make it through to the index.
Pretty astounding numbers no matter how you look at them, especially when you consider that there's one blog being created every half-second, even controlling for the spam blogs. It's a classic example of exponential growth, a fact even more apparent when you look at this
chart.
Many bloggers are pretty active, too. This
chart shows posting volume (with some interesting callouts pointing to world events), illustrating that there are nearly 19 posts per second—1.6 million posts per day!
That's a lot of blogs. And a lot of posts. But what's the impact?
Answering that question requires more than just these numbers, but consider this
chart that compares links from bloggers out to external sources. What you find is that out of the top 30 link sources, only two (xujinglei and Boing Boing) are "non Mainstream Media" sources (as defined by Technorati). More blogs show up in
this graph, but the bulk of sites listed are still mainstream commercial entities.
Next, take a look at the number of bloggers updating their sites on a regular basis. Considering that Technorati currently lists over 50 million blogs in its directory and reports back that there are 1.6 million posts per day, that means that only 3 percent of blogs are being updated each day (1.6/50, if you want the math). And that number's probably charitable: Many popular blogs update their content several times a day, a number that would drag the average posts per day per blog down considerably.
There's a lot of evidence out there that the blogosphere follows the
Long Tail model, where a few big and influential players are balanced out by myriad smaller niche players, leading to the "death of common culture," a viewpoint that I've subscribed to for a long time. The mainstream media still seems to hold the bulk of attention (as shown by
this chart) and is joined by a few big blogs (so big that it's probably arguable that they're now mainstream media ... as much as that designation would bug my friends at
Boing Boing). Most bloggers are niche players and will probably remain that way, especially if you consider the theory of networks as outlined in Albert-Laszio Barabasi's excellent book
"Linked: The New Science of Networks" that describes how big players stay big and small players have to work extra hard to keep up.
What this means for all of us who publish on the Web is that as the blogosphere grows it's also coalescing. As the big players cement their standings, having an impact by starting from scratch is going to be tougher and making money even harder. The genius of a system like
AdWords is that it puts advertisers in a spot where they don't have to care necessarily about being on the most heavily trafficked properties—they just have to be in play down the long tail.
Where's the future of the blogosphere? I picked "blogging" as one of my "
Fads of the Future" several months ago, and I still stick by my prediction insofar as someday people will realize that a blog isn't a panacea for a poorly marketed company and that really doing a blog is hard work. While the estimates of the average lifespan of a blog vary widely (I've seen anywhere from two months to three years), I suspect that most of the blogs being created in the past 45 minutes I've been writing this article (5,400 blogs by Technorati's estimation) won't be around next year as active entities.
Does this mean that you shouldn't blog? Of course not! I
blog and will continue to do so. Personal reasons aside for blogging, it is still a pretty viable commercial activity if you want to connect with customers, get the word out about products or provide some value to those who connect to your company. Just don't expect that being there is enough. Making your signal rise through the noise is getting tougher all the time.
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