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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.
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.
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Comments
That is a crazt statistic,
That is a crazt statistic, but believable..
By "he" I mean Dan Frommer
By "he" I mean Dan Frommer in the post linked in your article.
Your analysis is slightly
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.
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