Measuring the Blogosphere... or How Big is It really?

Boštjan Špetičbos@zemanta.com

How To Web ConferenceNovember 2010

Dinosaur Big!

Who Might Know?

Blogging Platforms? Professional Researchers? Catalogs? Compete? Google?

1. Official data

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.org

Netlog

Tumblr.com

Livejournal.com

2. Professional Research

Technorati

Nielsen Accenture eMarketer

200M (2008)

33% USA

150M

85M in USA

30M in USA

3. Catalogs

AlltopTechnorati

Blog CatalogFederated MediaBest Of The WebNetworked Blogs

My Blog LogPostrankLoud3rToprankAdageWikio

200k ?

200M

4. Traffic

Can we estimate from traffic? Alexa, Compete, Comscore Hosted platforms are centralized.

Compete Traffic Example

Blogger.com Only dashboards Unique Visitors == bloggers

8.2M

Blogspot.com Only blogs Unique Visitors == readers

60M

Traffic Interpolation

WordPress.com - LiveJournal.com - Tumblr.com - Blogger.com - Typepad.com - Squarespace.com - Netlog.com -

3.700.000

700.000

1.000.000

8.200.000*

1.000.000

1.000.000

100.000

5. Google Blog Search

a) Get random sample of blog posts

b) Heuristics to guess platforms

c) Compare with previous numbers

This way we identify 61% of blogs.

Better for non-hosted platforms.

Works only in English.

Blog Search Sanity Check

WordPress.com - Wordpress.org - LiveJournal.com - Blogger.com - Typepad.com - MovableType.com -

7.50%

28.30%

0.40%

20.20%

2.80%

1.80%

+= 61% (en only)

Bringing it all Together

Official data where available

Compete interpolation for hosted platforms

Google Blog Search interpolation for non-hosted platforms

6. Bonus: Internal Data

Blog search measurement for well known blogging add-on

+

Their own unpublished internal number of active users

=

best estimate for active, monthly, English blogosphere:

10.000.000

Bottom Line

Trust No One! Blogosphere 3x-5x overestimated

Don't take no for an answer Knowing your numbers is competitive advantage

If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist