Blogging By The Numbers

The blog [define] revolution is well underway, giving every Internet user the opportunity to become an online journalist. While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many individuals are using Web sites as journals, Blogcount estimates that there are roughly 2.4 million to 2.9 million active Weblogs as of June 2003.

Of this figure, Blogcount attributes more than 1.6 million active users to the top three centrally hosted services. Smaller hosts, intranet blogs, and standalone tools account for the remainder.

How Many
Blogs?
  Registered Active As of
LiveJournal 1,121,464 526,535 June 2003
Blogger 1,500,000 705,000 June 2003
DiaryLand 850,000 400,000 March 2003
TOTALS 3,471,464 1,631,535  
Note: Based on management reports
Source: Blogcount

Of the 655,631 Weblogs currently indexed by the The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITL) BlogCensus, the overwhelming majority are published in the English language.

Top
Blogging Languages
Language Count
English 350097
Portuguese 54496
Polish 42677
Farsi 27002
French 10381
Spanish 9509
German 7736
Italian 7017
Dutch 3684
Icelandic 3542
Source: NITL BlogCensus

Roughly 2 percent of the online community has created a blog, according to Jupiter Research (a unit of this site’s corporate parent). Interestingly, the majority (60 percent) of bloggers are dialing up to access their online journals, and more than half (57 percent) have a household income below $60,000 per year. Jupiter also found that blogging is split evenly among the genders, with most (70 percent) bloggers having an online tenure of more than 5 years.

While there may be several million blogs eating up bandwidth, Jupiter estimates that only 4 percent of the online community read them. The demographics of blog readers differ from those that create and publish to the sites — particularly in the gender and income categories.

Blogs seem to be read mostly by men (60 percent vs. 40 percent women), in homes where the total income is more than $60,000 per year (61 percent). Dial-up remains the connection of choice (54 percent compared to 46 percent broadband), and the majority (73 percent) of blog readers have been online for more than 5 years.

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