Measuring the Impact of Blogs

WSJ reported If you read press coverage about blogs, you might conclude that just about all Americans are reading a blog. But then you wouldn't have time to read the press coverage, because if surveys are to be believed, you're probably busy creating your own blog. The numbers of the blogosphere range widely. Are there 10 million blogs, or 32 million?

Who cares? I only worry about my blog, and the blogs I read.

Do a quarter of online Americans really read blogs, as one oft-cited survey found? And why do rankings of the most popular blogs vary so much? Adding to the confusion: disagreement over exactly what a blog is. In our young era of blogging, there's still no consensus. "Blog" derives from "Web log," and everyone agrees that a blog should be regularly updated, with new entries in reverse chronological order -- and that the entries can be about anything. But millions of people establish blogging accounts with free software providers like Google Inc.'s Blogger, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN or Six Apart Ltd.'s LiveJournal -- it takes mere minutes -- and then never post to their blogs.

Something I did when working on Comparison of Blog Services

Others password-protect their blogs and use them to share photos and data with a small group of family members, friends or colleagues. Whether or not you count all those represents a big chunk of the swing from 10 million (cited recently in the New York Times and USA Today) to 31.6 million blogs (Ottawa Citizen and the Ann Arbor News). Both are world-wide estimates. First, let's step back and consider why we're counting blogs at all. You no longer see articles that attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Web by stating how many Web pages there are. But blogs are still in the process of entering mainstream consciousness, so numerical credibility is important; bloggers themselves cite the statistics a lot. It turns out that counting blogs isn't as hard as counting Web pages. When writers who use common blogging software want their blogs to be publicized, they choose to automatically "ping" computer servers for companies like Technorati Inc. and Intelliseek's BlogPulse, whose goal is to measure and index blogs.

Do you add the two together? What about blogs that ping both? And what abou blogs that don't ping either?

Then Web users can go to those companies' Web sites and run searches to find blogs that have written about topics they're interested in. BlogPulse now indexes about 11 million blogs world-wide; Technorati, about 10 million. Over the past six months, both have seen a doubling in the number of blogs on the Internet. "Nobody asks how many Web sites there are out there," Natalie Glance, a researcher with BlogPulse, told me.

They did when websites were new, and none of the answers were anywhere close, because so many new websites were going online.

"We're fortunate that all these ping servers do exist. But it's really a hard question to answer." That's because not all blogs ping the search services. In Korea, some software providers say they have millions of blogs, and neither BlogPulse or Technorati count them all. "It's pretty significant undercounting," Ms. Glance said. David Sifry, Technorati's chief executive, told me at a blogger conference last week that he was headed to Seoul later that week to try to get Korean blogs in his index. (Already, about two-third of the blogs indexed by Technorati are in languages other than English.)

Technorati and BlogPulse both define blogs as being meant for public consumption. This is an important distinction because Internet companies seeking to cash in on the surge in blogging have rolled out products that combine blogging software with other tools like photo-sharing and social-networking services. When you create an account with one of these companies, you're considered to have a blog, even if you never write a post. The same goes if you restrict access to a select group of readers. Microsoft's MSN Spaces says it has 10 million accounts, but a spokeswoman says more than half of those accounts are available only to a restricted set of users.

In fact as my above mentioned article indicated, that is one of the big selling points of MSN Spaces, Live Journal, and Yahoo 360, being able to limit viewership to friends, or friends of friends, or in the case of Yahoo360, friends of friends of friends.

Meanwhile, BlogPulse's Ms. Glance says that half of MSN Spaces blogs appear to be blank, based on her research. Some analysts have tried to count private blogs. Perseus Development Corp., a Braintree, Mass., market-research company, last month reported 31.6 million blogs, using an unusual approach: It added reported numbers of blogs from companies like MSN, with its own projections for number of blogs for companies like Google that don't disclose stats. It arrived at the projection by forming random strings of letters, and then searching to see if those letters corresponded to a blog on the service. Services with lots of matches were assumed to be hosting more blogs than those with fewer matches.

That is not a very reliable way of checking, IMHO. Many blogs have names 30 characters or longer.

"We tried to extend the random-digit dialing from the telephone world into the blog world," Jeffrey Henning, chief operating officer of Perseus, told me. (The Blog Herald, a blog about blogs, counted over 60 million blogs this week, relying on figures from operators world-wide.) No one has sole control of the definition of blog, but it seems to me that for the sake of counting, Technorati and BlogPulse are right to exclude the private blogs. That puts their estimates below those from some other analysts, but the companies are focusing on what they can directly count, and relying less on estimates. Still, the number of blogs isn't really that informative, since so many blogs are abandoned soon after they're launched. It's more useful to look at the volume of blog posts. According to a presentation by Technorati's Mr. Sifry at the blog conference, daily volume is 800,000 to 900,000 posts. But Ms. Glance says BlogPulse, which says it has more blogs in its index, counts only between 350,000 and 450,000 posts a day -- and that number has held steady for about a year, even as the total number of blogs has accelerated. Regardless of who's right, notice that these number are well below estimates for the total number of blogs, countering the image of blogging as a multiple-times-a-day activity. Ms. Glance says that based on her research of activity in January, the typical active blogger posted an update just once every 10 days.

Jeff Jarvis: blogged Bialik leaves out one important factor that must not be ignored: RSS. My Sitemeter stats say I had 340k pageviews in March but my server stats said I had 996k and the difference is mostly RSS (and things such as the page views I generate when I publish posts). But, of course, RSS is complicated because just because a feed is downloaded doesn't mean it's read (and what does it mean to read a feed vs. reading a post?). If all this is only about bragging rights, it doesn't matter. Brag away. Debate at will. Who cares? The power of blogs is not about the total or the biggest (that so old-media-think, so mass) but instead about the rising volume of individual conversations.

Rex Hammock blogged The Numbers Guy at the WSJ does the math on blogs: Bottom line, there's a lot, but nobody knows, but who cares: we're getting close to a point where how many there are will be irrelevant. No one asks, "how many websites are there?" anymore. They won't do that about blogs soon, either. (Which, I guess is what that USA Today writer was really saying when he said that interest in weblogs is going to chill. It's hard to keep considering something a phenomena when it becomes as pervasive as air.)

Juan Cole blogged As I see it, the problem for advertisers is that blogging appears to be a form of narrow-casting. They like broadcasting. You place an ad on even a low-ranking cable television show like Star Trek Enterprise (while it was still limping along) and about 3 million people see it every week. You place an ad on even a popular weblog like MyDD and Blogads says that it has 146,000 page views a week. (Technorati.com measures its popularity rather by looking at how many other blogs link to it.)

Tom Biro blogged Thursday's Wall Street Journal has an article by Carl Bialik asking if the numbers quoted in various places about how many blogs there actually are are correct - or if they based on different perceptions of what a blog is, live blogs or not, or a number of other factors.