Some blogosphere stats, June 2005

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I'm updating some figures on the number of blogs out there, and stumbled on a few intesting trends. Here is a raw report, and don't count on me to make an analysis right now!

In January 2005, LiveJournal claimed 5.7 million users with 2.5 million "active in some way". Right now on June 1 they claim 7.3 million of accounts which represents a gain of 28%, but with 2.6 active in some way which is a gain of only 4%. I have no numbers for TypePad (may be I should just bug Loic or get him drunk to figure them out).

In France, in the same period, Skyblog moved from 1,4M to 2,1M of accounts (+50%). Unfortunately they don't provide any number to estimate active vs. inactive blogs.

Netcraft saw 63.5M web sites in May and reckons that 27.7M are active, while Perseus counted 32M blogs in April on only 20 blog services (top North American services only, excluding others and self-hosted blogs). And today, Technorati claims an index of 10.7M blogs (a third of what Perseus sees and 17% of what Netcraft sees) and 1.173 billion links while Google claims to index 8 billion web pages (so the links in the 10.7M blogs in Technorati would represent 15% of the Google index, though it doesn't include images).

Perseus saw a growth of 10M blogs in the first quarter alone. Netcraft saw the number of sites grow by 1.2M per month (and 580,000 active sites per month) between January and May 2005. David Sifry reckons that the number of blogs doubles every five months.

Clearly, the blogosphere is the most active part of the web.