Mullenweg Indicates Over 30 Percent Of Blogs Are Spam

By Doug Caverly - Mon, 03/03/2008 - 18:06

Connecting the dots with a calculator

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.

Mullenweg Indicates Over 30 Percent Of Blogs Are Spams

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.

News Tags: Blogs, Spam, WordPress, Matt Mullenweg

About the author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

10 Comments

By Forum internet marketing (WPN reader) - Sat, 05/16/2009 - 03:55

nowaday is hard to protect

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

By Francis (WPN reader) - Thu, 04/30/2009 - 16:10

Great Article

Blogs that are mostly spam and no relevant content don't stay around long.

By internet marketing indonesia (WPN reader) - Sun, 03/01/2009 - 12:05

this is ver good article

i have more experience now about wordpress and matt :)

By Internet Marketing Indonesia (WPN reader) - Mon, 11/10/2008 - 03:52

thanks for your article.

thanks for your article. Very help me. I will more like visit to webpronews site. :) Fantastic

By Maqsood (WPN reader) - Thu, 07/24/2008 - 00:13

How to protect from spam in blog

Is there any body know how to protect from spamming blog

By Wall Decals (WPN reader) - Mon, 07/21/2008 - 06:32

About Spam Blog

I agreed, there are some bloggers doing spammy techniques for their blogs in order to be visible in search engines.

By Sire (WPN reader) - Sat, 07/05/2008 - 05:32

spam blogs

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.

By Scranton Web Design (WPN reader) - Fri, 03/07/2008 - 15:00

That is a crazt statistic,

That is a crazt statistic, but believable..

By Sam B (WPN reader) - Tue, 03/04/2008 - 09:03

By "he" I mean Dan Frommer

By "he" I mean Dan Frommer in the post linked in your article.

By Sam B (WPN reader) - Tue, 03/04/2008 - 09:02

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.