The South African blogging numbers for 2007 and the beginning of 2008 are in, and they tell a story almost as eloquent as do some of the blogs.
Just six months ago, blogging was the next big internet fad in South Africa. Seemingly from nowhere, in the middle of the year, the number of blogs and media attention around those blogs exploded into the mainstream consciousness. It was all so sudden; it naturally carried all the lightweight baggage of a new fad.
But underpinning it was an apparent tipping point for social media and social networking in South Africa, with most of the country’s key platforms and innovations for what is collectively known as Web 2.0 emerging in a four-month period from April to July 2007.
The key moments for blogging included the launches of Afrigator, the continent’s first blogging aggregator; Amatomu, the first comprehensive tracking service for blogs and bloggers in South Africa; My Digital Life by ITWeb, which put solid commercial resources and interests behind blogging; and the Times, the first mainstream newspaper to embrace blogs and the social networking environment.
At the same time 24.com upped the ante with an aggressive development agenda for its own blogging platform.
The result was that, after a slow build-up, an explosion of activity occurred in July and August 2007, representing a tipping point for the phenomenon. But what if that turned out to be hype and momentary excitement? Would the new trend be sustainable?
The new data, collected and collated by World Wide Worx from January to March 2008, provides a clear indication.
The sites that participated in the research include Afrigator, Amagama, Amatomu, iBlog, Blueworld and My Digital Life, as well as 24.com. Both Amatomu and Afrigator numbers were segmented to ensure they did not duplicate data reported by other blogging platforms where blogs are linked to the two.
These figures include those blogs hosted on international platforms only where they are linked back to Amatomu and Afrigator. It is not possible to account for all blogs hosted on international platforms, nor for those that are self-hosted but not linked to Amatomu or Afrigator.
As usual, no animals were harmed in the compilation of this data, once again with the exception of the rats that had it coming to them, as well as two corporate marketing executives who tried to prevent the information reaching their CEOs.
The most significant items of data are represented by the following table:
Total SA blogs
Dec 2006: 4941
Aug 2007: 25 136
Dec 2007: 26 179Active SA blogs
Dec 2006: 600
Aug 2007: 2 953
Dec 2007: 3 789Source: World Wide Worx
The numbers show that the total number of blogs barely grew in the four months from August to December 2007 — a mere 4% — but that the growth in active blogs leaped by 20%, from 2 953 to 3 789 active blogs. These are defined as blogs that have been updated in the month prior to the end of the counting period.
The update period was initially set as two weeks, but some of the blogging platforms had been generous in their interpretation of this definition last time round, due to the number of blogs that remained active even though they had not updated in a specific two-week period.
The total number of blogs can also be misrepresented: it excludes all blogs deleted or removed from blogging platforms. So, for example, 24.com went on a clean-up campaign to get rid of empty blogs and spam blogs, cutting a substantial percentage from its numbers. This suggests that the overall number of blogs created is, in fact, also growing substantially.
The total number of blogs represents the extent to which blogging captured the imagination of aspirant bloggers. Active blogs, on the other hand, are a barometer of the commitment of bloggers. This indicates that, despite many blogs being deleted and many bloggers going back to their day jobs, commitment to blogging is still growing at a rapid pace.
Further evidence is to be found in the number of posts to South African blogs. The numbers are as follows:
Posts to SA blogs
Number of posts to SA blogs in 2007: 510 907
Monthly posts for August 2007: 39 938
Average monthly posts for full year: 42 575
Monthly posts for January 2008: 48 120
The numbers show that the number of monthly posts to South African blogs increased by 20% in five months, matching up to the growth in active blogs over the first four of those five months.
The big question, then, is whether anyone outside of the self-proclaimed blogging elite (you know who you are) noticed. And the big answer is even bigger than expected. The number of monthly page views grew by no less than 100% in the five months from August 2007 to January 2008:
Page views on SA blogs
Page views on SA blogs 2007: 55,757-million
Monthly page views for August 2007: 5,198-million
Average monthly page views for full year: 5,226-million
Monthly page views for January 2008: 10,448-million
Aside from the number of page views doubling in five months, in January the South African blogs passed the remarkable milestone of 10-million page views in one month. Had the South African blogosphere been one site, it would have ranked in the top 10 of South Africa’s most-viewed sites based on the monthly average for the last quarter of 2007, at number eight. If only media sites — that is, aimed at readership rather than usage (such as mail and jobs sites) — were taken into account, it would have ranked third.
Arthur,
Thanks for taking the time to do this research.
Based on your figures I have calculated that 24.com in Jan 2008 had 26% of the active bloggers in SA. That was then a total of 970. In Feb we ramped up to 1271 active – so I will be keen to see where we sit in the next round.
Thanks again for helping us gain insight into the market.
I assume there is quite a long tail but it would be interesting for you to take the numbers we have all submitted and release as a series of pie charts of market share in the various areas for the key players. One could do this without revealing figures – even though I don’t really think that metrics like this are a secret. People state users and page impressions freely.
Cheers,
Elan.
“Afrigator, the continent’s first blogging aggregator”?
The first pan-African is actually BlogAfrica, created by Global Voices/Harvard/Ethan Zuckerman and now being managed by AllAfrica media – http://www.blogafrica.com/.
Great article. Very interesting insight into the industry.
Regards,
Keith
Thanks for putting those figures together – even though it does make me feel an enormous weight pushing me down from above! That is a lot of page views though!
Well done bloggers!
I think those statistics are a bit wrong.
I run 63 blogs whereas only one of them is one Amatomu, and not one of them is on Afrigator.Not that I have anything against Afrigator.
That means there is another 62 blogs unaccounted for.
Now if other people do the same well you know where I am going with this.
This is such an encouraging article, thank you Arthur for your research and report.
Joining in on forum discussions has opened up a whole new world for me and I trust the momentum for blogging will continue to grow.
I have wondered if there is a site available with guidelines for newbie SA blog enthusiasts who would like to get a blog up and running, but do not know too much about the technicalities.
Personally I believe ‘Amatomu’ is largely responsible for the tipping point of Blogs in SA. Bloggers are now actively competing against each other, and doing so more visibly, and Amatomu’s clear rankings across categories do a good deal to encourage competitiveness and engagement – in my opinion.
These are some very interesting numbers. Thanks
Could blogging technically be considered the Fifth Estate, existing as a virtualised form of the Third and Fourth Estates (citizenry and media) and born of the desperate need to highlight deficiencies, oversights and general incompetence existing in traditional (Fourth Estate) media?
Have “the people” been driven to unearth and publish more relevant or gritty topics, factoids and opinions currently being missed or glossed over by the now fully commercialised media “industry”?
Oh, wait… that’s not fair… I’m probably misrepresenting the other 99% of blogs which really have nothing to add to social debate, consciousness-raising, even as entertainment value.
;->
Quite possibly, in this context, it scarcely matters if each of the proliferating bloggers offered up just a single vignette of valuable information or stimulating opinion before slipping into obscurity. There Fifth Estate goal might be achieved anyway, and made all the easier by the steady co-opting of the Fourth Estate into the commercial goals of its “stakeholders”.
Whew, got all that off my chest in true blogger style!
Doyen/maven/guru Arthur does excellent work providing some of the most reliable, empirical data about the SA digital realm, but these numbers don’t mean as much as they appear.
Frankly, it’s way past time for the blogosphere to be right-sized to the handful of “social commentators” who can retain their readership for longer than 18 months simply by remaining relevant.
I reckon quality editorial trumps unsolicited, unsubstantiated opinion every time, and even the newest generation of media consumers know this instinctively.
I look forward, wearily, to huge churn and shrinkage in the blogosphere.
(Thought Leader survives, of course! Relevance and all that…)
… and comments on blogs are even less inclined to maintain standards of syntax, spelling etc. as evidenced above, ahem.
Very interesting and encouraging findings, but:
i) Many blogs, like stars, have a habit of dying over time. So while there is undoubtedly an explosion in active blogs over the months surveyed, a few months of activity does not guarantee sustained activity.
ii) While the numbers are impressive in themselves, they are tiny in relation to the population of SA. A *lot* more needs to happen before we are a nation of bloggers.
I look forward to further results to see where this thing is going.
A time for serious blogging indeed. No space for Vernon Koekemoer jokes in this here blogosphere…
Seriously though, in a little over two weeks vernonkoekemoer.co.za has soared to number 4 overall on the amatomu rankings. That says a hell of a lot about the performance and seriousness of the SA blogosphere. I’m privy to the number of visits taking place on this new site, and it is nowhere near what I thought it would need to be to achieve that top ranking.
In an age when blogs can be thrown together in fifteen minutes or less, and visits rise and fall on the viral whims of an audience, I’d take a pinch of salt before looking at these numbers with any sort of conviction.