Dead blogs

At Sifry's Alerts, David Sifry reports that Technorati now tracks almost 20 million blogs, and that there are approximately 70,000 added every day.

He doesn't mention how many disappear.

David does say that 55% of blogs are still posting three months later, which means 45% are not, which is a pretty high attrition rate. Domains may not expire for a year or even more (depending on how optimistic the blogger was when they created the blog), so you can't be sure a blog is dead until DNS tells you it is, but a blog that isn't posting regularly isn't really a blog. David's stats tell us something more about that: he says there are approximately one million new posts made daily. One million posts spread over twenty million blogs means a lot are very inactive, a fact made even more true by the many blogs who post multiple times per day. David says 13% update at least weekly or more often, so I'd guess those busy folk are likely responsible for a lot of the new posts.

If the 70,000 per day figure continued without attrition, the blogosphere would be growing 10% per month. David's figures tend to confirm that: he says it doubles in size every five months.

Well, again, I'd ask how many of those tracked weblogs have had anything to say in the past five months. Blogging regularly is hard work, and it's just not something most people will keep doing for long. At this growth rate, it wouldn't take all that long for literally everyone to have a blog, and indeed that may come true in some sense, but it doesn't mean that those blogs will be active or ever read.

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