The Blogcount Estimate:2.4 to 2.9 million weblogs
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA:
The Blogcount.com Estimate.
Based on management reports of active weblogs centrally hosted.
| Registered | Active | As of | |
| LiveJournal [1] | 1,121,464 | 526,535 | 23 June 2003 |
| Blogger [2] | 1,500,000 | 705,000 | 9 June 2003 |
| DiaryLand [3] | 850,000 | 400,000 | March 2003 |
| 1,631,535 |
So call it 1.5 to 1.8 million.
What isn't included?- Smaller hosts. Hosts are springing up everywhere, especially to serve bloggers sharing cultures and languages. Poland, for example, has more than a 100k blogs hosted locally. Radio and Moveable Type users, early adopters, may account for another 100k users.
- Intranet blogs. The Firewall Of Invisibility.
So how should I create a fudge factor for everything else? I'm going to use the great data at blogcensus.net.
- They find 38,470 polish language bloggers, let's say 40% of the ones I know by looking at hosts.
- Out of 499k blogs identified, about 27k were created with Moveable Type like standalone tools, 5.4%.
- Of the 527k LiveJournal users, they crawled 5% of them (25k). (This is a new space for them and they are just now starting to spider it.)
Ideally, I would have similar information for 2 to 3 other larger crawlers like Technorati so we can compare overlaps.
For now, I'm going to say we need a fudge factor of 1.6 (using the 40% Polish number) although my gut says to go higher. So that means:
| Date | Estimate (millions of active weblogs) | Source |
| 2003-6 | 2.4 to 2.9 | Phil Wolff, blogcount.com |
Notes:
- http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml
- Jason Shellen of Blogger/Google speaking at a June conference. http://dijest.com/bc/old/2003_06_09_bc#200404998 and a March 2003 Evan Williams email citing 1.2 million registered users. I'll use LiveJournal's 47% ratio
- Diaryland. Site weblog provided an insider's guess of 850k diaries. http://news.diaryland.com/6.html. Absent other information, applying LiveJournal's 47% Active of Registered Accounts ratio produces 400k active diaries.
