While Dave Sifry’ ‘State of the Live Web’ report gives a positive spin on blogging growth, the numbers look different if you dig deeper.
According to BusinessWeek, while the total number of blogs ever tracked by Technorati has grown to 70 million from 57 million on Oct ‘06, the number of active blogs updated in the last three months has plateaued at 15.5 million. Therefore, the percentage of active blogs has come down from 27% in Oct ‘06 to 21% in Mar ‘07. What’s more, while the number of new posts per day increased from about 1.3 million to about 1.5 million, the number of English language posts per day dropped to 495,000 in Mar ‘07 from 507,000 in Oct ‘06.
BusinessWeek quotes Gartner -
Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.
- and insists that the number of bloggers is peaking and even argues that it might be a good thing for bloggers -