Perseus Development has randomly surveyed 10,000 blogs on 20 leading blog-hosting services to release the latest edition of its model of blog populations. Based on this research, Perseus estimates that 31.6 million blogs have been created on services such as LiveJournal, Xanga, MSN Spaces, AOL Journals and BlogSpot from Google. Based on the rapid growth rate demonstrated by the leading services, Perseus expects the number of hosted blogs created to exceed 53.4 million by the end of 2005.
The leaders (high momentum, long-time players) were BlogSpot, LiveJournal and Xanga, all launched in 1999. At the end of the first quarter of 2005, each had between 6.6 and 8.2 million accounts. The primary challenger (high momentum, new player) is MSN Spaces, which launched in December 2004 and was closing in on 4.5 million accounts at the end of the first quarter. Upstarts (moderate momentum, new players) included Six Apart’s TypePad and Greatest Journal among others. Niche players demonstrated longevity but little momentum.
One of the newer aspects of blogging is that it’s now an added feature being incorporated into other web applications. Social networking sites like the reinvented MySpace.com and teen sites like Bolt.com now offer blogging as a standard feature of their online accounts. Blogging appears to be used by just 4.7 percent of Bolt’s 4.5 million accounts and by a somewhat greater percentage of MySpace.com’s 12 million accounts. While neither service has been included in this study, they are testaments to the continued expansion and growth of web logs.
For more information on Perseus’ survey view the results online at http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/.
