Its been 4 months since the last Blog Herald Blog Count (October 2005) and the blogosphere keeps getting bigger!
The good news: the blogosphere continues to boom. This month I estimate there to be 200 million blogs in existence.
The sums by country add up to approx 154 million blogs and by host 185 million, but this doesn’t take into account a pile of places + smaller hosts + self hosted blogs. Hence I’m calling the figure 200 million blogs.
Like October, I’m providing two sets of figures, one based on the number blogs per country (where I am able to ascertain or estimate the number of blogs in a particular country) and a set of figures per reasonably sized provider.
I won’t bore everyone with the history of the Blog Count this month, or why I do it, but I will say this: Technorati doesn’t even come close to tracking all blogs, and they never will. Note to the MSM, don’t quote Technorati figures as being representative of the number of blogs, look at some of the sources I have referenced, and do your own sums.
Australia: approx 750,000
Ben Barren in ZDNet Australia for 2006. This is the same figure I estimated in Oct 05. Australia has always been difficult to calculate because of the .com / .com.au tracking problems, however I think the figure is about right.
Austria: approx 20,000
Ref: Loic Le Meur. These figures are now 7 months old, but I’ve seen nothing since.
Belgium: approx 100,000
Skynet: 68,000 in October 2005, however they seemed to have removed the figure from their site.
Bosnia and Herzegovina: less than 2,000
LJ: 989. Rest unknown. This figure is down from October when LJ reported a figure 50% higher than it does now.
Brunei: less than 2,000
Canada: approx 700,000
very difficult to estimate as many Canadians would use US providers. LJ shows 225,000.
China: 36.82 million
People’s Daily Online quoting Baidu on 19 Dec 05. This figure also corresponds with earlier press reports showing figures above 30 million from other sources in China as well.
Croatia: approx 75000
blog.hr now has 65,291 blogs at the time of writing + a little more for other sites.
Czech Republic: approx 10,000
Ref: Loic. Figure now 7 months old so could and should be higher.
Finland: approx 170,000
Hugo Martin from June 05. I’ve got no more recent figures however I suspect the figure is higher given blogs started getting press during the German elections + you tend to see German bloggers popping up in the German media for frequently these days.
Greece: less than 5,000
ref: Loic figure 7 months old, no further information since.
India: 1.2 million
Financial Express Dec 05.
From research I previously received from Koorosh Eslamzade estimated there was 700,000 Iranian blogs, however it’s difficult to confirm the figure. In the October blog count I tried compiling Iranian/ Persian blog hosts but it was near on impossible this time. Maybe 200-300,000?? certainly blogging is very popular in Iran amongst younger people.
Ireland: approx 75,000
Loic says 9,000 7 months old and as in October I believe the figure would be a lot higher.
Israel: approx 100,000
Japan: at least 10 million
Search Engine Journal quoting Ask Jeeves Japan in Nov 05 (10 million). I couldn’t get the translation to work properly but as of today I found a figure of 9,943,869 at their site.
Malaysia: approx 20,000
The Star in June 05 (now offline) + LJ.
The Netherlands: approx 600,000
ref: Loic, now 7 months old.
Poland: approx 1.6 million
mylog.pl: 134,500, (Oct 05, stats removed from site)
eblog.pl: 90,00 (Oct 05, possibly more now, they seem to split the figures upto into fotoblogs and what not, but can’t find a decent Polish online translator)
Russia: approx 400,000
LJ: 232,928 users
Loic claims 800,000 but I’m putting the figure at 400,000 (as I did in Oct 05) without any hard evidence, although likely more
Spain: approx 1.5 million
Terra.es reports 1 million MSN Spaces + others. (Oct 05)
Loic, figures 7 months old.
United Kingdom: approx 4 million
1.5 million UK residents using Spaces as of the end of June 05 (Terra.es ). 183823 UK users on Live Journal. Anglosphere problem in estimating figure as many UK bloggers using US services, see notes from July and October blog count. Likely to be higher again with MySpace and Xanga in the picture.
United States: approx 50-70 million
Impossible to calculate and this is a rough guess only. If we presume that the vast majority of people using MySpace, Xanga and Spaces are from the US then the figure would be higher again.
By host (known, and 1 million and above)
Blogger: 15 million
Cyworld: 13 million
October 2005 figure, they no longer publish the total number on site.
SixApart: 12 million
based on 9.5 million at Live Journal plus other published reports from SixApart, may be marginally higher.
Bokee: 7 million +
unconfirmed reports, however given the total number of blogs in China likely to be higher.
Planet Weblog Service: 6 million
June 2005 figure.
Skyblog: 3.8 million
Yahoo Blogs Korea: 3 million
Greatest Journal: 1.3 million
Other US Live Journal clones: 1 million
onet.pl 1 million