March 4, 2008
Over 80 percent of blog posts are probably spam
Doug Caverly highlights a Matt Mullenweg quote indicating that about 1/4 of all the blogs ever on WordPress.com were spam (aka splogs). Now, that’s probably a higher fraction than for the blogoverse overall, because:
- WordPress.com provides costless hosting; using your own domain costs money.
- Besides being free, WordPress.com hosting may provide a little “google juice”, which is the whole SEO point of spam blogging.
But there’s one more factor. Splogs have much higher posting frequency than real ones. 10-20+ posts per day is not uncommon, and 50-100+ is not unheard of. That’s 5-10X the post frequency of even the more active human-written blogs. So let’s assume:
- 10% of all blogs are spam.
- 10% of all blogs are actively written by humans.
- 80% of all blogs belong to humans, but are updated very infrequently if at all.
In that case, over 80% (and indeed probably over 90%) of all blog posts are made by machines rather than by human beings.
Categories: Blogosphere, Search engine optimization (SEO), Social software and online media, Spam and antispam
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