WordPress.com - Dead Blog Stats

There are more than one million blogs on WordPress.com. That’s a ton of blogs anyway you look at it. And, of course, conveniently enough, you can look at it lots of different ways by checking out WordPress.com’s stats.

The missing mystery stat is the Dead Blog Stat. It would be pretty tough to come up with an actual Dead Blog Stat because you don’t really know when the plug should be pulled on a blog. Prolonged inactivity or lack of posts on a blog doesn’t really mean the blog is dead. The blogger may have lost interest or may be working on another project. But like Monty Python, the blog might be screaming “I’m not dead yet!”

But how many of the million plus blogs on WordPress.com might be dead blogs?

It’s no secret that the Web Hosting industry makes the big cash on the dead site. $9.95 hosting per month or lower makes a killing when you have sites that are active for a week or two at upload and then get lost in Google’s servers and never see any significant traffic.

So if the Web Hosting industry makes tons of cash off of dead sites, how much does WordPress.com make off of dead blogs? I think it’s an honest question when the million plus blog figure helps drum up 29 million in venture capital from the likes of the New York Times and others. Don’t get me wrong, I think 29 million dollars is a spit in the bucket when it comes to the true value of WordPress and WordPress.com and I’m glad they got the cash.

I’m just asking the question. How many dead blogs are there?

WordPress.com provides stats on signups and deletions but you obviously can’t count deleted blogs as a dead blog. If somebody deletes the blog… well, at least they care enough to delete it.

Taking a look at the stats provided for pageviews which are considered to be “raw aggregate traffic on public WordPress.com pages”, they’re basically (currently) hanging around the 18 million pageviews a day mark. Doing some crappy math with round numbers, that’s something like 18 page views a day per blog. Surely a worthless figure but at least I can divide.

WordPress.com has some major players in VIP Hosting. I don’t know whether or not the VIP Hosting is included in the stats provided by WordPress.com, but I don’t know why they wouldn’t be. As far as I can tell, all of those big players like CNN Political Tracker, All Things D and even the Scobelizer himself are all hosted on the VIP Hosting service and they all have some form of the wpstats javascript on their pages. My guess is the big boys are included in the 18 million pageviews a day.

I don’t think it’s inconceivable that the big boys account for millions of pageviews a day among themselves. Where does that leave the traffic for the other joe schmoes? Me thinks far less than 18 million pageviews a day divided amongst about 999,500 blogs. Again, I’m using round numbers.

Look a little closer at the posting stats and things get very interesting. The posts per day (currently) are sub 100,000. There was a huge peak up to 120,000 a while back but calling it a 100,000 posts per day seems fair. Some 50,000 pages are created each day but at least one of those per blog is created with the “About” page at signup. There are about 25,000 signups a day so it looks like the signups account for 25,000 pages created and 25,000 posts (Hello World!). Posts and pages with actual content not attributable to new blog signups might be something like 100,000 (keeping it round).

That looks like 100,000 posts a day on more than a million blogs or far less than 10% of the blogs are active on a daily basis. Still a huge number of posts on a huge number of blogs, but 10% or less is… well… 10% or less. Sure, people don’t post every day so there is a rotational post factor that needs to be considered. I’m not including comments because you can comment on a dead blog. In fact, that’s the plan with most spammers anyway… spam the old posts on the old blogs. It’s like running off tackle, run it until the other team stops it.

At this point, this post is so damn long, I forgot was I wondering… oh yeah… the dead blog stat. Well, how many dead blogs are there? It looks like far less than 10% of the blogs post actively each day and some of the 18 million pageviews a day probably never touch the quietly desperate blog.

What would it take to determine how many dead blogs are on WordPress.com? I’d like to see a “blogs without posts in 1 week - 1 month- 6 months - 1 year - more than a year” stat. It would take about a minute to write the query and it sure would be interesting. Go ahead guys, you got the 29 million. Cash the check and write the query. I want to know!

Tags: blogs, web-hosting, websites, Wordpress, wordpress.com