Mullenweg Indicates Over 30 Percent Of Blogs Are Spam

If you’re willing to trust Matt Mullenweg, and believe WordPress is fairly representative of blog platforms everywhere, then have we got a statistic for you: it seems that at least 30 percent of all blogs may be spam.

Matt Mullenweg – Developer Of WordPress

During an appearance at the Future of Web Apps conference, Mullenweg stated that WordPress powers 2,523,000 blogs. Also, as Caroline McCarthy wrote, "WordPress has deleted more than 800,000 ‘splogs,’ or spam blogs."

Divide the second number by the first, multiply by 100, and you get 31.7 percent. Almost one-third, if you round up, or three out of ten, if you’d prefer to round down. That’s high, and that’s ignoring McCarthy’s "more than" and the possibility that WordPress missed some splogs.

Still, Dan Frommer, who inspired this little analysis, pointed out that things could be worse. "Anti-spam software firm Commtouch says 96% of global emails are junk," he wrote.

Let’s just hope blog spammers don’t take the comparison as a challenge.

There are 10 Comments. Add Yours.

Sam B
March 4, 2008 at 8:02 am

Your analysis is slightly distorted. Firstly, "one-third of all blogs are spam" implies that if I open three random blogs, I can expect one of them to be spam, when in fact I can’t as that one has been deleted. "One-third of all blogs *created* are spam" is more accurate.

He’s also done the calculation right. The proportion is spam / (non-spam + spam), not spam / not-spam. which gives you 24.1%. To put it in words, people create three times many non-spam blogs as spam-blogs, which means that one fourth of blogs created are spam.

Pedantry over.
Sam B
March 4, 2008 at 8:03 am

By "he" I mean Dan Frommer in the post linked in your article.
Scranton Web Design
March 7, 2008 at 2:00 pm

That is a crazt statistic, but believable..
Sire
July 5, 2008 at 5:32 am

Even though a lot of blogs may be spam their life may well be short lived as they will have useless or poor content and subsequently will not have any visitors.
Wall Decals
July 21, 2008 at 6:32 am

I agreed, there are some bloggers doing spammy techniques for their blogs in order to be visible in search engines.
Maqsood
July 24, 2008 at 12:13 am

Is there any body know how to protect from spamming blog
Internet Marketing Indonesia
November 10, 2008 at 2:52 am

thanks for your article. Very help me. I will more like visit to webpronews site. Fantastic
internet marketing indonesia
March 1, 2009 at 11:05 am

i have more experience now about wordpress and matt
Francis
April 30, 2009 at 4:10 pm

Blogs that are mostly spam and no relevant content don’t stay around long.
Forum internet marketing
May 16, 2009 at 3:55 am

nowaday is hard to protect from spamming blog, in my humble opinion of course