Gartner: Blogs to Peak Next Year

In a story that seems to have gone mildly unreported in the blogosphere, data consultancy Gartner has predicted that the number of active blogs and community contributors (emphasis mine) will peak in the first half of 2007:

Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

If Gartner is right, this is decidedly bad news for the widget ecosystem.  There's no explanation given as to what "community contributors" means - does this include forums, wikis, social networks, and gulp, consumer rating sites as well?  If so, I find it hard to believe given the amount of the world that is still unplugged, and the massive growth numbers that social networking sites continue to put up.

One thing that Gartner is crystal clear on is that they don't expect the number of active blogs to go much higher than 100M worldwide.  Ever.

As building a business in a flat market is a heck of a lot tougher than building a business in a growing market, this report might give pause to those widget and tool providers who are solely targeting blogs.

Comments

[Nic Brisbourne]

Lawrence - I saw you present at a Barcamp in London a month or two ago and have been meaning to install your widget since then. Finally got to it today and .... it didn't work. Fine to install. Looked good on my blog, but then when I tried to leave a review for myself to test it I couldn't log in or register. I just tried it on your site with the same result.

It tells me that the email is already registered.

Also - one other small thing - I use an English keyboard but when I type in your widget it assumes my keyboard is configured US style. The big difference is that the @ sign is not Shift-2 for us - important when you are entering email addresses.

Good work though. If you can fix these probs I will definitely give it a go on my blog. Do you get many reviews on yours?

[daniel]

hi, Lawrence,

should this be "Blogs Have Peaked This Year"? The Gartner story is about 2007! I haven't seen any stats to suggest any slowdown/stop in growth. Have you?

daniel