‘A few thousand’ blogging professionally

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 November 2006 at 19:14
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Guardian Unlimited, Times Online

The growth in the number of blogs around the world is slowing somewhat, but “a few thousand” people are now blogging for a living, according to the latest “State of the Blogosphere” report by Technorati founder Dave Sifry.

The latest edition of Sifry’s quarterly report, which was released this week, seems to shows that Technorati now tracks 57 million blogs worldwide.

The number of blogs is doubling approximately every 230 days, a figure that represents a slight slowing in the growth of the number of blogs.
Around 100,000 new blogs are added to the Technorati database each day, but that the growth is slowing slightly.

But as the MIT Advertising Lab blog points out, however, this may be a statistical glitch caused by improvements in Technorati’s ability to filter out automatically-generated spam blogs designed to defraud contextual advertising services. If fewer such splogs are being counted, it is possible that more genuine blogs are being created than ever.

Sifry told Frank Barnako of Marketwatch that “a few thousand” people are now blogging for a living. Most bloggers, Sifry said, do not make enough money to live on, but “hundreds of thousands” can at least cover their bandwidth costs with income from their blogs.

A major factor in the growth of commerical blogging, is the emergence of advertising brokerages being set up by groups of popular bloggers. MessageSpace in the UK is one example of this.
Sifry’s report also shows that BBC News Online remains the British news source that is most frequently linked to by bloggers. The BBC was sixth over all in that league table, with Guardian Unlimited 11th and Times Online 17th.