Blog Count for July: 70 million blogs

Note: This article was originally written in 2005 and numbers have significantly changed since then.

Duncan Riley> A little late this month with the monthly blog count due to the overwhelming responses of many readers with contributions of figures, coupled with emerging reports in the press to compile. As always I’ll qualify that the Blog Count is about counting blogs, not active blogs or bloggers. There a lots of new countries this month but I’ve limited the list to get it published, it’s going to take me a few more weeks to get a bigger list together yet again. Tomorrow I start next months list and there are plenty of extra countries to survey and some good leads I need to run through the online translator. As always if anyone has any stats they’d like me to add email me, phone me (if I’m not online voice mail is always on) (347)427-9299 or leave a comment.

Conclusion for July: there are now at least 70 million blogs in existence with 63 million blogs having been created on 8 leading blog hosting sites that host 1 million or more blogs alone.

By country:

Australia: approx 400,000
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

Austria: approx 20,000
Ref: Loic Le Meur

Belgium: approx 100,000
Skynet: 60,000, Loic suggests more again. 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: 1200. 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 260,000

China: 5 million and growing
ref: South China Morning Post.

Croatia: approx 40,000
Hugo Martin points to blog.hr which now has just short of 30,000 blogs + a little more for other sites.

Czech Republic: approx 5,000
LJ and others.

Denmark: approx 5,000
Loic Le Meur

Finland: approx 100,000
Media=blogi

France: approx 3 million
Loic and others. Skyblog has nearly 2.5 million alone.

Germany: 280,000
Hugo Martin

India: approx 100,000
Financial Express

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 200,000
Loic Le Meur, Hugo

Japan: approx 4 million
Original link lost but as per my report here + allowed for some growth. Joi Ito has some interesting general stats here.

Malaysia: approx 10,000
The Star (thanks Colbert)

The Netherlands: approx 600,000
Loic Le Meur + comments to previous blog counts here indicating similar figures on Marketing Facts (although there is some suggestion that it may be closer to 750,000 but I’m going with Loic’s figure for now)

Philippines: approx 75,000
LJ + Pinoy (thanks Vix)

Poland: approx 1.4 million
I started at Loic but a quick look at the leading Polish blogging sites onet.pl (700k+), Tenbit (200k+) , Blog.pl (100k+) and Mylog (100k+) gives at least 1.1 million (Loics figure) + ad in minor services and Anglosphere services to 1.4m. The figures also indicates Poland is one of the fastest growing blog markets in Europe

Russia: approx 300,000
source: Mosnews refers to LJ as the most popular Russian service with around 185,000 users. Add figures from other sources. Loic claims 800,000 then provides evidence for 250,000. There is probably more than 300,000 but I’m yet to find some decent evidence.

South Korea: approx 15 million
There is little dispute that there is at least 15 million blog like sites in South Korea, the only question is whether they all count as blogs: Joi Ito doesn’t think they do, and states that there are 10 million “hompy” sites which “are personal home pages with photo albums, guest books, avatars, background skins, and background music” and 5-6 million blogs. However The Korea Herald reports (no longer available) have previously included these “hompy” sites as blogs. BlogCount.com reports on the same Korea Herald report here back in January but calculates 11.9 million blogs. The IHT refers to the Cyworld service as hosting “mini-blogs” in December. I’m siding with the MSM on this one, but have decided to note that there may be some doubt to the figure based on format. It should also be noted that at least 3 million are hosted on Yahoo! Blogs Korea and another 6 million on Planet Weblog Service (as at Jan 05)

Spain: 1.5 million
Terra.es reports 1 million MSN Spaces blogs in Spain alone, but no figures are available for Blogger. Loic reports 1.1 million but you’d have to think there would be blogs of Spanish origins on Blogger and other sites as well.

Ukraine: 50,000
Loic

United Kingdom: 2.5 million
difficult to count because of the Anglosphere problem with tracking country of original but we know there are 1.5 million UK residents using Spaces as of the end of June (Terra.es ). We know there are 200,000+ UK users on Live Journal. Traditionally Anglosphere blogs have flocked to Blogger as well so lets say at least 200-300,000. Thats 2 million. Then there’s the DIY bloggers and those using smaller services including Xanga, MySpace….could be more again. I also don’t think the British will like being beat by the French so expect more growth here.

United States: approx 15-30 million
Its impossible to put an exact figure on the number of US based bloggers because, lets face it, US based blogging services have members from all around the world, and there are thousands of them at that. There are 3.7 million on Live Journal, and other sites would be dominated by US blogs. US bloggers would also be more likely to have multiple blogs and abandoned blogs as well mainly due to the length of time the US has been blogging.

By host (over 1 million)
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
see note at the bottom

MSN Spaces: 15 million
Terra.es including 1 million users in Spain, at least 2.5 million US and approx 1.5 million in the UK

Blogger: 14 million +
total registered blogs: Blogger gives a unique indexed number for every new blog, the latest one I’ve observed is over 14 million.

Cyworld: 11 million

SixApart (Live Journal/ TypePad, MT): 9.5 million
I reported 8.7 million at the end of May and LJ has grown by 0.5 million in that time. I’m guessing again on the final figure because MT installs are hard to track, and SixApart haven’t release user numbers on TypePad as far as I’m aware

Planet Weblog Service: 6 million
Leading South Korean blogging provider

Yahoo Blogs Korea: 3 million

Skyblog: 2.5 million

Greatest Journal: 1 million

Other US Live Journal clones: 1 million
ref: Perseus

Update 22 July: I now have a report that Xanga.com has 40 million users. Given that Xanga is a “Weblog Community” it would be safe to presume that most, if not all of the 40 million users has blogs. I’ve updated the list to reflect these figures.