On Growth In The Blogosphere

There have been a few posts recently about current growth in the blogosphere. Pranam, over on eBiquity, looked at using the term 'I' in search engines like BlogPulse and Technorati. One problem with looking at the chart from BlogPulse is that as BlogPulse provides percentage results, there is no way to know what the increase or decrease of absolute counts is. As the key question here is about growth, not finding both the actual numbers, one can use other terms to get a picture of the rate of change. Below is the Technorati graph for 'monday OR tuesday OR ...' It appears to reflect Parnam's results.

Graham Charlton at e-consultancy has posted some interesting discussion in reaction to Parnam's post and to Gartner's earlier stronger prediction that the blogosphere at large will peak this year. Michaela Carmichael has also contributed some thoughts on the topic.

Personally, I'm with the skeptics here. I suspect that the models used in making this type of prediction are too simple.

• On the global issue, the percentage of the world's population that have access to the internet is small (<20%). The remaining population are all fodder for the blogging bug.
• Much of this speculation makes assumptions about the discoverability of blogs. The basic elements of the blogosphere's infrastructure, and our ability to discover, index and search this data are all still rudimentary.
• I believe there will be very interesting dynamics as certain demographic groups move from certain platforms (e.g. MySpace) to others (e.g. topical blogging supported on services like TypePad) and as new platforms appear to serve the next generation of users whose behaviour we can only guess at.
• Social Media in general will continue to evolve both in terms of its technology and in terms of its role online an in society at large. As it evolves, the things that we call blogs now will change and become more integrated with the web.

In other words, claiming that growth is over assumes a far too static view of the subject being measured. Understanding how the users needs will change, how the use cases will change, how the role of social media will change is key to truly  figuring out where things are going.

On the business side, would the plateau be a problem for companies like Technorati or Nielsen BuzzMetrics? I suspect that in both markets there is so much to explore that stasis of this kind wouldn't pose an immediate problem. For social media monitoring firms like BuzzMetrics, there is still much growth to be had in services that requires deeper understanding of the relationship between social media content and dynamics, the corporations for whom the service is provided and the rest of the media stream at large. However, for companies like Technorati, there is less room for growth in terms of features and more of a need to grow the user base. Zero growth in the blogosphere would challenge the growth of part of their user base but they could continue to grow as a function of the number of online users interacting with the content (e.g. searchers). Even if the blogosphere had stopped growing, its visibility and level of integration will continue thus bringing more consumers of the content.

It would be interesting to see David Sifry discuss some of these topics in his next State of the Blogosphere post (related post).

Comments

[Pranam Kolari]

Matt,
Thanks for your comments.

Certain clarifications:
(i) I use BlogPulse percentages to correlate data with Technorati numbers. Percentages quite naturally are not indicators of growth.
(ii) My results are only limited to blogs. Social Media overall will only grow.
(iii) I doubt India (20% of population) will ever see the blog bug the way US has seen it. They appear to have adopted other platforms (e.g. Orkut) directly. Its also very different culturally, and tools that worked in the West need not necessarily be effective there. China might be a different story.
(iv) My name is spelt wrong, twice, Parnam -> Pranam ;)

In general, I am truly excited by what Social Media offers to users and to businesses that listen and engage. I couldn't agree more that new services are key drivers moving forward.

I look forward to David Sifry's next report.

[Arnaud Fischer]

I am certainly guilty of looking at these charts in a bit of a light way. I actually find them entertaining, visually correlating BlogPulse to IceRocket, Technorati, even Alexa and Comscore. This said, there is no doubt these services create real value, eventually connecting disjointed pieces of data hosted in totally different places. Very right, the blogosphere is not the sum of social media out there. Collaborative directory building with tagging and comments are pop'ing all over. The data mining, semantic categorization, ... behind these charts will only get better and better at transforming unstructured online dialog into marketing insights. Consumer generated media is exploding. Advertisers traditionally follow consumers. Social networks are already channeling significant amounts of traffic around and should accelerate the pace of brand advertising dollars shifting online. After i) search engine optimization and ii) search engine marketing, iii) Online brand and product monitoring, online reputation management could very well be the next stop.

-arnaud