The Blogging Geyser

31.6 Million Hosted Blogs, Growing To 53.4 Million By Year End

4/8/2005 - Perseus Development Corp. randomly surveyed 10,000 blogs on twenty leading blog-hosting services to expand its model of blog populations, first documented in The Blogging Iceberg. Based on this research, Perseus estimates that 31.6 million blogs have been created on services such as BlogSpot, LiveJournal, Xanga and MSN Spaces, with 10 million created in the first quarter of 2005 alone.

Key Blog Hosts

The key blog hosts out of the twenty examined can be analyzed on two dimensions: momentum (new user accounts averaged over the life of the service) and longevity (length of time operational). Only the key hosts are shown below.

Based on this quantitative analysis, the key players can be summarized as:

• Leaders: BlogSpot, LiveJournal and Xanga
• Challengers: MSN Spaces
• Upstarts: TypePad, Blurty, Greatest Journal, AOL Journals
• Niche Players: Dead Journal, Diaryland/Pitas

The leaders – BlogSpot, LiveJournal and Xanga – were all launched in 1999 (though Xanga was not initially a blogging site) and at the end of the first quarter of 2005 each had between 6.6 and 8.2 million accounts. The primary challenger is MSN Spaces, which launched in 14 languages and 26 markets in December and was closing in on 4.5 million accounts at the end of the first quarter.

TypePad is the most successful of the upstarts, while AOL Journals has been a disappointment to AOL, which – as a result – is launching a new blogging service targeted at teenagers.

Growth Curve

BlogSpot and LiveJournal account growth has often run neck and neck, but BlogSpot is pulling away from LiveJournal, with over 8 million accounts at the end of the first quarter, compared to 6.6 million for LiveJournal.

The chart also shows the growth in blogging services using the LiveJournal.org software to run their sites: About My Life, Blurty, Crazy Life, Dead Journal, Greatest Journal, Insane Journal, JournalFen, Needless Panic, Plogs and WeedWeb.

Forecast Based on the rapid growth rate demonstrated by the leading services, we expect the number of hosted blogs created on these twenty services to exceed 53.3 million by the end of 2005. Blog Hosts Covered by the Perseus Model AOL Journals About My Life Blog-City BlogSpot Blurty Crazy Life Dead Journal Diaryland Greatest Journal Insane Journal JournalFen LiveJournal MSN Spaces Needless Panic Pitas Plogs TypePad Weblogger WeedWeb Xanga One of the new features of blogging is that blogging is a new feature of other web applications. Social networking sites like the reinvented MySpace.com and teen sites like Bolt.com offer blogging as an account feature. Blogging appears to be used by just 4.7% of Bolt's 4.5 million accounts and by a somewhat greater percentage of MySpace.com's 12 million accounts. While, as a result, neither service has been included in this study, they are testaments to the continued expansion and growth of web logs.

Conclusions

Accounts on blogging services have grown much faster than originally forecast. In fact, Perseus published its first forecast of the hosted blogging industry at the worst possible time from a forecasting standpoint: October, 2003. This was right before the inflection point in account growth, as growth dramatically accelerated.

Perseus expects much debate about what was the external cause of the inflection point. Perseus would argue that Dave Winer's Bloggercon, backed as it was by Harvard, was the inflection point for the hosted blogging industry. The first Bloggercon attracted incredible attention from the mainstream media, propelling interest in the category and dramatically accelerating the account growth. This sudden growth was like a geyser: dramatic, unpredictable and trending vertical.

-- Jeffrey Henning
   Chief Operating Officer
   Perseus Development Corp.

Caveats

This is a mathematical model of hosted blogs, and as such some caveats are in order and some assumptions have to be clarified.

• This analysis does not cover nonhosted blogs - blogs that individuals maintain on their own servers using local software. Such blogs require more work to set up and will be characteristically different than those blogs created using hosting services. Do note that, since many hosted blogs can be assigned their own domain names, blogs that appear to be self-hosted are often in fact using one of the covered hosting services.
• Accounts on LiveJournal-based hosts include syndicated feeds. Perseus estimates 51,900 of LiveJournal accounts at the end of the first quarter were syndicated feeds.
• This survey has a confidence interval of 0.98% for a 95% confidence level. In other words, 95% of the data points will be within a margin of 0.98% of representing the actual population.
• Survey sampling error (as reflected in confidence levels) is just one type of survey error. This is the second in a series of studies we will be conducting on the blogging community, each designed to help strengthen our understanding of the community as well as to refine our blogging research methodology.