Blog growth
Blog.com has opened public registrations. All that's missing now is selecting and connecting to a VISA acquirer so users can upgrade account types from free into paid plans. The opening raised the question of how much growth is predictable for blog.com. Right after opening, it started growing at a rate around a couple dozen blogs per day (on the scale of 0.1% of all blog growth).
Sifry's blog has some numbers that can be useful when predicting possible growth. The first stat is an important one: blog creation rates are still exponential (a first order exponential), which means that blog.com, while entering the game extremely late -- by 'net standards -- has a large market ahead.
Other interesting stats are on blog abandomnent rate. We intuitively figured it would be high, and technorati measures the rate at 45%. I don't have the numbers at hand, but I guess we're seeing an abandoment rate quite a lot higher (possibly due to test-driving of a new service). It may be transient. Then again, it may be something to watch.
If the number of 3 million weblogs is correct, then after testing phases, we wound up with a scale the order of 0.1% of all available blogs (consistent with the growth rate). I'm curious to see if feature set alone can drive relative growth rate above relative blog count, when comparing against global blog growth rate and count.
Sifry's blog has some numbers that can be useful when predicting possible growth. The first stat is an important one: blog creation rates are still exponential (a first order exponential), which means that blog.com, while entering the game extremely late -- by 'net standards -- has a large market ahead.
Other interesting stats are on blog abandomnent rate. We intuitively figured it would be high, and technorati measures the rate at 45%. I don't have the numbers at hand, but I guess we're seeing an abandoment rate quite a lot higher (possibly due to test-driving of a new service). It may be transient. Then again, it may be something to watch.
If the number of 3 million weblogs is correct, then after testing phases, we wound up with a scale the order of 0.1% of all available blogs (consistent with the growth rate). I'm curious to see if feature set alone can drive relative growth rate above relative blog count, when comparing against global blog growth rate and count.
