David Sifry, founder & CEO of Technorati, has a post that details the remarkable growth of blogs. He says that the number of blogs is doubling every six months — amazing:
Technorati currently tracks over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day – and 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That's an increase both absolute and relative terms over just 3 months ago, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were active. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity. In addition to that, about 3.9 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly.
A few perhaps self-evident responses:
- Blogs will be a valuable source of ad inventory over time (as people like John Battelle already have established). Creating meaningful ad inventory on blogs for marketers is still in its very early stages, notwithstanding AdSense and Yahoo!’s content initiative.
- User-generated content is a massive cultural phenomenon that every traditional publisher now needs to contend with in one form or another
- Organizing and providing access to that content is a major challenge (so-called “microformats” notwithstanding) and a major opportunity
