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The real story of the State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry's latest State of the Blogosphere report notes that the blogosphere is maturing. Forget the 57 million total blogs. The interesting number is that there are more authoritative blogs than there are traditional outlets in any single medium.

It's time to stop citing that there are 57 million blogs -- it is a pretty meaningless number. Since 26 million are spam or abandoned, they don't count. I'm not even sure the 31 million active blogs (that have been updated at least once in the past 3 months) is a very meaningful number -- in the blog world this isn't very active. At best these numbers serve as a proxy for the growth of CGM. But with comScore and NetRatings traffic numbers for YouTube and MySpace, I think this number has outlived its usefulness.

The number that really caught my eye is:

  • 30,488 high authority and very high authority blogs

For context there are about 13,000 radio stations, 9,000 TV stations, and 17,000 magazines in the US. (source: Forrester Research, "Left Brain Marketing")

In other words, authoritative blogs are  more numerous than any other single traditional medium. That alone is a number a marketer or public relations person needs to take seriously.

Posted by Jim Nail on November 6, 2006 at 06:25 PM | Email this post Permalink

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David Sifry has published his latest State of the Blogosphere report.  It includes all the usual data points we've come to expect (number of ... [Read More]

Tracked on Nov 6, 2006 9:30:05 PM

Comments

But are you confident in the methodology that arrives at "30,488 high authority and very high authority blogs"?

Posted by: todd defren | Nov 6, 2006 7:13:02 PM

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