I was asked at a recent event where we presented if I could share statistics on the growth of blogging and social media. Here are some numbers on overall size, language breakdown, visits and advertising.
Blogosphere growth is still strong. The state of the blogosphere from David Sifry shows that Technorati track 57 million blogs and 55% are active. They define active as a posting in the last three months. This is not all blogs but the growth percentages are representative.
The mix of languages is interesting with nearly 40% being in English and one third in Japanese. They do give a proviso that their numbers on language wildly underestimate the Korean language and they do not index Skyblog which is a very large French platform for bloggers.
Advertising spend in social media is growing and increased by 145% last year. The relative numbers are small but upside is large. The number of web visits that go to a social media site is 1 in 20. This for me is the most interesting trend and is a sign that the advertising revenues will continue to grow as advertising to this space gets more targeted.