Blogging some figures
Reality check: Jupiter Research has published some interesting figures on blogging. Somewhere between 2.4 and 2.9 million active blogs exist, but they remain a tiny slice of web life. Only 2% of web users have created a blog, and only an estimated 4% read them (which is a good reminder to bloggers and media people to always explain the word weblog and blog and not assume your audience has any idea whatsoever of what you're talking about :^) ...). Blogging is split fairly evenly between genders, but more men than women read them (a 60/40 split). Nearly 3/4ths (73%) of blog readers have been online for 5 years or more, suggesting (to me) they are either fairly young or the more techie crowd that first jumped online.
Of the live weblogs, Blogcount believes 1.6 million are part of three main services:
| How Many Blogs? | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered | Active | As of | |
| LiveJournal | 1,121,464 | 526,535 | June 2003 |
| Blogger | 1,500,000 | 705,000 | June 2003 |
| DiaryLand | 850,000 | 400,000 | March 2003 |
| TOTALS | 3,471,464 | 1,631,535 | |
| Note: Based on management reports | |||
| Source: Blogcount | |||
(chart from Jupiter CyberAtlas)
And here's a chart on blog languages, based on the 655,631 Weblogs currently indexed by the The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITL) BlogCensus. Granted, that leaves at least about 2 million of them unevaluated by language...
| Top Blogging Languages | |
|---|---|
| Language | Count |
| English | 350097 |
| Portuguese | 54496 |
| Polish | 42677 |
| Farsi | 27002 |
| French | 10381 |
| Spanish | 9509 |
| German | 7736 |
| Italian | 7017 |
| Dutch | 3684 |
| Icelandic | 3542 |
| Source: NITL BlogCensus | |
All of this suggests a very, very small -- but growing -- phenomenon. Read the full piece here.