The Blog Herald Blog Count October 2005: over 100 million blogs created
Related entries in In the News
Its been three months since the last Blog Herald Blog Count due to the richness of the figures I’ve been collecting and the time its takes, but the Blog Count returns for October, and will now be published quarterly.

Now for the good stuff: the number of blogs in existence: over 100 million blogs

There are two sets of figures: based on major blog using countries the figure would be around 75 million, which is a patchy figure because its difficult to count blogs based on the country of origin due to the worldwide phenomenon of people using US companies. Based on blogs created at major hosts (a more accurate measure) the figure is actually 134-144 million. So I’m taking a round 100 million + blogs figure.

As always I’ll qualify that the Blog Count is about counting blogs, not active blogs, legitimate blogs (vs spam blogs) or bloggers. Are there a lot of inactive blogs? yes. Are there a lot of spam blogs? yes as well, indeed I’d suggest maybe 40-50% of every blog on Googles Blogspot domain is a spam blog, but the vast majority of blogs out there aren’t.

The history of this count: it started because I was tired of reading press reports that there were 4 or 5 million blogs out there when some countries had more than this alone. The figures still aren’t good in the press. In this last week I’ve read that there were 14 million blogs out there. Technorati is now nearly upto 20 million, but its still no where near the true number of blogs out there based on reported numbers. If SixApart alone counts 11 million users, then surely there are a lot more than the nearly 20 million Technorati and others track!

So here we go: October 2005.

By country:

Australia: approx 450,000
Still not a lot of hard figures here, but based on report in the Australian Newspaper 19 May 05 and allowing for growth since. Like other members of the Anglosphere though its hard to quantify blog numbers due to the dominance of US blogging firms and .com domains

Austria: approx 20,000
Ref: Loic Le Meur

Belgium: approx 100,000
Skynet: 68,000. There are problems with a definite Belgium count because of the split between French and Dutch speakers. It’s likely that some Belgium bloggers use services in the Netherlands and France, + naturally the Anglosphere offerings.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: less than 3,000
LJ: 1300. Rest unknown

Brunei: less than 3,000
LJ, Blogshares and others.

Canada: approx 700,000
approximation, difficult to ascertain due to the Anglosphere problem, LJ shows 285,000

China: 6 million and growing
ref: http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=26700“>South IHT, South China Morning Post. Note the IHT article incorrectly reports 14.2 million which is a Technorati overall figure, however the earlier SCMP piece reported 5 million so we’d think 6 million, possibly more at this stage.

Croatia: approx 50,000
blog.hr which now has just short of 40,000 blogs + a little more for other sites.

Czech Republic: approx 10,000
Ref: Loic

Denmark: approx 15,000
Overskrift.dk has nearly 6,000, Smartlog 2,200, Loic has some earlier figures here.

Finland: approx 100,000
Media=blogi
Same as last quater, unable to ascertain any new figures.

France: approx 3.5 million
Businessweek called it 3 million back in July, and yet Skyblog alone now has 3 million. Ublog 65,000, Canalblog 64,200, Loic for other older figures.

Germany: 300,000
Hugo Martin from June + a little growth on this figure. Unlike France which is dominated by Skyblogs, German bloggers appear to be all over the place.

Greece: less than 5,000
ref: Loic

India: approx 100,000
Financial Express, same figure as last quarter as I couldn’t find anything more up to date but I suspect the number may be a lot more. Certainly India has its own blog awards now as well, and are mentioned in the press.

Iran: 700,000
Yes, this is a remarkable number, but I have it on research from Koorosh Eslamzade, but would note like all the figures here these are total blog numbers and not active blog numbers (which are between 40,000 and 110,000).
Persian Blog: 520,000 , Blogfa : 55,000, Blogsky: 20,000, Mihanblog: 25,000, Parsiblog: 7,000 , Perianlog: 9,500

Ireland: approx 75,000
Loic says 9,000, I don’t believe the figure could be low considering the “Irish economic miracle” of the 1990’s and Irelands continued status of growth and IT friendliness, although the population of just over 4 million people is always going to produce a fairly low figure. Problem again that most Irish bloggers would use Anglosphere blogging sites.

Israel: approx 100,000
thanks Jariv

Italy: approx 250,000
Splinder: 144,000, Excite: 17,500, Bloggers.it: 13,500, Timblog: 12,000, ilcannocchiale.it: 12,000, Aruba: 6,000, LJ: 7,500 + others per Loic.

Japan: at least 5.5 million
Ask Jeeves Japan is currently tracking 5.2 million blogs, suspect the number is much higher again.

Malaysia: approx 20,000
The Star + LJ. Difficult to ascertain as many would blog on anglosphere services such as Blogger.

The Netherlands: approx 600,000
ref: Loic

Philippines: approx 75,000
LJ + Pinoy. Could be significantly larger as writers are using Anglosphere services.

Poland: approx 1.5 million
onet.pl 825,000, Tenbit 228,000 , mylog.pl: 134,500, eblog.pl: 90,00, Blog.pl: 70,000, Blogi.pl: 37,500, Blogx.pl: 44,000 and Ownlog.pl: 13,500 = 1,442,500 + minor services= 1.5 million

Russia: approx 400,000
LJ: 218,000 users. Loic claims 800,000 but I’m putting the figure at 400,000 without any hard evidence, although likely more

South Korea: approx 20 million
See posts here and here + notes from previous blog counts.

Spain: approx 1.5 million
Terra.es reports 1 million MSN Spaces + others.

Ukraine: 50,000
Loic, not updates from last quarter

United Kingdom: 2.5 million
1.5 million UK residents using Spaces as of the end of June (Terra.es ). 227,000+ UK users on Live Journal. Anglosphere problem in estimating figure as many UK bloggers using US services, see notes from July blog count.

United States: approx 30-50 million
Impossible to calculate although there are 4 million on LiveJournal and 3 million on Spaces. Reports that Myspaces hosts 20 million and I’d be guessing that most of these are US based. The US figure would also represent the highest number of abandoned blogs as well.

By host (over 500,000)
Note: these are based on known and rough figures based on media reports and other sources. If you are a blog hosting company and are not included here please send me your user data and I’m happy to add it.

Xanga: 40 million
re: WPXI

MySpace: 20-30 million
most recent number here. Not sure how many are blogging though, have read the figure was 20 million hence 20-30 million, these are also “private blogs” and are not indexed on sites such as Technorati.

MSN Spaces: 18 million
Terra.es + growth over the quarter

Blogger: 15 million +

Cyworld: 13 million

SixApart (Live Journal/ TypePad, MT): 11 million
SixApart figure in recent media releases

Planet Weblog Service: 6 million
Leading South Korean blogging provider (same as last qaurter as no new figure available)

Yahoo Blogs Korea: 3 million

Skyblog: 3 million

Bokee: 2 million

Greatest Journal: 1.16 million

Other US Live Journal clones: 1 million
ref: Perseus

onet.pl 825,000,

Persian Blog: 520,000