Blogging Plateau
Business Week reports a trend that is completely expected - the number of "active" blogs (those blogs that had been updated in the last 90 days) has now reached critical mass and is plateauing at about 15.5 million blogs. This fact was revealed by some investigative reporting by BW's Heather Green, who asked Dave Sifry at Technorati to break out the # of active blogs from Technorati's famous blog explosion graph (below).
The percentage of English language blogs dropped from 39% to 33% in the six month period between Oct 2006 and Mar 2007 implying adoption, acceptance and growth of blogging worldwide.
Simply put, those who want to or like to blog are doing so... intuitively, it's easy to understand why the blogger abandon rate is high - it takes a lot of time to write well, authors hit a wall and run out of ideas, and many are written so poorly or lazily that the lack of traffic becomes discouraging.
The number of real estate blogs chronicled at Bloodhound Blog (236) or at Pittsburgh Homes Daily (an exhaustive 750) implies that, given a US population of 300 million +/- , there is approximately one real estate blog per 400,000-1,000,000 people. The two well known blogs in StPaul MN (population 400,000) is double the average! No saturation yet. Blogging aside, the social media which includes the 27,000 Active Rain members, the networking sites like LinkedIn and even MySpace are still growing at a linear upward rate.
Real estate is all about networking with a vast local audience and I'm still assuming real estate blogs and its related social media are still at the early stages of the "S-curve". And it's not hard to see that a certain percentage of real estate professionals will try out blogging because it is such a powerful real estate marketing tool, but will realize how hard it is to maintain. It's a big reason why Project Blogger is an important exercise to show how to blog successfully.
Technorati Tags: technorati, blogging, blogging adoption, bloodhound blog, pittsburgh homes daily
Everytime I see figures like these I find it hard to believe. I think that the 750 number like in the Pittsburgh Homes Daily is still a small percentage of the real estate blogs that exist. Wouldn't you guess the numbers to be more like 5,000-10,000 active real estate bloggers? I guess that gets into the debate over what is an active blog.
Reply to this
Once we start seeing national news stories about how the real estate industry is blogging, we'll know the peak is near. The national media has a way of "breaking" news just before the decline. I'm enjoying the ride in the meanwhile. I also think we will soon witness a blending of traditional websites with blogs. A free HTML editor of some sort or an easier to use and better graphics version of MS FrontPage...
Reply to this
These figures don't surprise me. Out of the 100 people you and I taught in our blogging workshops, only a few that I know of are actually putting in the time and effort necessary to build it into a power tool.
Our efforts continue to build impressive reults.
Reply to this
RE: Project Blogger and it's importance:
Stumbling out of the gates, it isn't giving me the 'warm and fuzzy feeling' that it is going to have any real impact on illustrating how to blog successfully.
But that's just my 2 cents.
Reply to this
If you count the Active Rainers, you have over 27,000 real estate bloggers --they just happen to be one one giant network blogsite.
RE Blogging is tough if you want to be considered well read---but that likely means read by other bloggers (yeah and maybe Long tail googleists). Blogging success, from a business standpoint, I suspect is a little different than just readers---it's getting paid.
Reply to this
I seriously doubt 20,000 Active Rainers are on average anywhere as prolific as those outside AR. In fact aren't like 50% of the top AR peeps also having their own "better than AR" blogs anyway?
I'm not meaning to sound like I'm dumping on AR. Just that 15,000 of them could stop posting and not be missed.
Blogging is more like writing a book in public than anyone really gives credit for. It's not for everyone.
Reply to this