How many blogs are there?

I recently discovered that PhilosFX has climbed 4 million places in the blog rankings, from 24 millionth place up to 20 millionth. OK, so PhilosFX is not a risk to unseat the #1 blog, the Huffington Post, anytime soon. That's perfectly OK with me. I like where we're at, I am thrilled you are here reading along, and I am delighted with the positive feedback that we're moving up.

To me, that 4 M climb looks like a big number and therefore, one could assume, a good thing. Up is Good! But of course, I wanted to know just how good is this good thing? Going from 24th to 20th is only a 20% jump if we started in last place. How many blogs are there, anyway? I need a denominator! Climbing 4 million positions out of 10 million blogs is a big 40% jump. Climbing 4 million out of 100 million is not so impressive. Climbing 4 out of 1,000 is zzzz.

Based on a survey of various sites out there, I would say that it must be very difficult to count the number of blogs! Estimates vary wildly. It looks like the number is closer to 200M than 100 or 300.

• About 200M, projected from 181M in Dec 11, 173M in Oct 2011 and 79M in Oct 2008. http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/buzz-in-the-blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers/
• About 200M, projected from 184M at the end of 2008. http://www.quora.com/How-Many-X-Are-There-In-The-World/How-many-blogs-are-there-on-the-Internet
• About 200M, projected from 70M in Jul 2005. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_blogs_are_there_in_the_world

Interesting

• The State of the Blogosphere. http://technorati.com/social-media/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2011-introduction/
• Top Ten Blogs Ranked by Traffic. http://technorati.com/blogs/top100
• Top Ten Showing Web Publishing Platform. http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/11/wordpress-completely-dominates-top-100-blogs/

Rank	Name	URL	CMS
1	The Huffington Post	huffingtonpost.com	Movable Type
2	Mashable!	mashable.com	WordPress – self-hosted
3	BuzzFeed	buzzfeed.com	Custom
4	The Daily Beast	thedailybeast.com	N/a
5	The Verge	theverge.com	Custom
6	TechCrunch	techcrunch.com	WordPress – hosted
7	Engadget	engadget.com	Blogsmith
8	Gizmodo	gizmodo.com	Gawker
9	Think Progress	thinkprogress.org	WordPress – self-hosted
10	Ars Technica	arstechnica.com	Custom

So here at PhilosFX we are not swimming with the sharks just yet. There are 20M blogs that get more traffic than this one. Fine. We may not be in the "Top 10", but being ranked at 20 of 200 puts us up in the top 10%!

And that's a good thing.