In Sifry's State of the Blogosphere post last year, he described the blogosphere as doubling every 5 months. The graph below shows the number of comment spam blocked from people using the Akismet WorkPress plugin. The y-axis represents the number of spam comments for a given day on a logarithmic scale. The major vertical lines are at 7 day intervals.
A rough measurement of this graph suggests that the number of spam comments per day captured by this system is doubling approximately every 3 weeks.
Now, this isn't anything like comparing like with like, but: My hypothesis is that the number of spam comments is growing faster than the number of posts.
Here are the assumptions that I am making:
- The number of daily posts is proportional to the number of active blogs.
- The number of active blogs is growing no faster than Sifry's cummulative blog growth.
- The pick up of the Akismet service is not growing faster than the number of active blogs.
A good reason to move to WordPress?
Now, ask me again about including comment search in blog search engines...
>A good reason to move to WordPress?
You know, there's no need to switch to Wordpress to get Akismet, it has an open API.
Posted by: ryan | January 22, 2006 at 12:07 PM
Id *still* like comment search, as I delete my (rarely occurring) spam (or just plain ignorant comments)
Posted by: matthew | January 23, 2006 at 11:50 AM
Your graph actually shows the "Akismet comment spam blocking" activity correct? There are a number of things that affect this besides the amount of spam out there - namely the adoption rate of Akismet and its inclusion in WP 2.0.
I realize you are not saying that your graph represents comment spam itself, but it sort of felt that way.
Posted by: Alex | January 23, 2006 at 12:45 PM
Alex,
I partially addressed this point in the post - in the last bullet point in the list of assumptions.
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | January 23, 2006 at 12:56 PM
Comment spambots tend to be rather specialized (with built-in assumptions about particular blogging software). Looking at Akismet stats largely tells you about the prevalence of WordPress comment spambots, but little about spambots for other blogging systems.
Moreover, as Akismet comes with WordPress 2.0, you're not even directly sensitive to the growth in the number of WordPress. What you may be seeing is simply the effect of people upgrading their WordPress installation to 2.0.
Since it sounds like you have the numbers available to you, why don't you plot the number of people using the Akismet plugin?
Then you could see whether the average blog is seeing more comment spam, or whether you are just seeing the effect of more Akismet users coming online to report it.
Posted by: Jacques Distler | January 25, 2006 at 11:20 PM
United States vs. Europe — Who's produce more spam ??
Posted by: Jack | April 22, 2006 at 08:32 AM
Wordpress is now a billion dollar industry. I love the flexibility it offers and all the themes and plug-ins make it so attractive. I used to think Akismet was a Pakistani cricketer until I started blogging !
A Stumble for your efforts :)
Posted by: Kevin Young | November 27, 2008 at 10:41 PM
Comment spambots tend to be rather specialized (with built-in assumptions about particular blogging software). Looking at Akismet stats largely tells you about the prevalence of WordPress comment spambots, but little about spambots for other blogging systems.
Posted by: darkfall gold for sale | July 16, 2009 at 04:28 AM
I tried to install Askmimet on my Wordpress website but it is no longer free. Does anyone know of a good alternative?
Posted by: Patricia Lombard | April 25, 2011 at 12:15 PM