Have We Reached the Peak of Mount Blog?
Great digging by Heather Green at BusinessWeek has uncovered the dirty little secret about the blogosphere that so many of us have surmised for some time. It ain't nearly as big as the hype indicates, though it remains incredibly important for communicators. Heather convinced David Sifry of Technorati to release more detailed data abbot his state of the blogosphere report. Technorati claim to be tracking 70 million blogs. That's not really accurate, however. The truth is that the blog search engine has tracked 70 million different blogs at one time or another. But just about 15 million of those have been updated in the past 90 days, suggesting that the vast majority of monitored blogs are dead.
When a blog loses its pulse, there's no need to include it in the population any longer.
Heather also writes: "The number of daily English language posts dropped to 495,000 in March from 507,000 in October." The numbers she published also reveal that growth in active blogs over the same period of time was minimal: 15.3 million last fall and 15.5 million today.
Obviously, that's still a huge number of blogs and nothing that can be ignored. But a good lesson for all here is that hyping numbers can end up making you look silly. In this case, the reality of 15 million is still impressive; saying 71 million just doesn't hold up against the facts.
I would love to see even more detailed data that indicates of the 15 million active, how many update more than once a week? Once a month? With less than a half million English posts every day, the number that post regularly must be incredibly small. Ultimately, those with a regular publishing schedule and audience will be the ones that are most likely to be influential.
One final note. The number of English blog posts daily stands at about the same as (or perhaps even a little less than) what we see at CustomScoop as far as the number of online stories from traditional media outlets each day. Put in that context, the blogosphere seems a lot less daunting to monitor.
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