Institute For The Future

20 million Chinese bloggers

"via SmartMobs,

An article at Xinhua Online states some new numbers for Chinese bloggers:

The number of bloggers who use Chinese reached 19.87 million in early November, according to a report released by Chinese Internet company Baidu on Wednesday. The figure represents a 24-percent rise over from the 16 million people who wrote their own blogs at the end of November last year, according Baidu. Bloggers updated their blogs every 7.6 days on average and 3.02 million were active bloggers who posted new writings within seven days. Just 4.6 percent of web writers updated their blogs every day.

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The growth in the number of Chinese bloggers slowed over the past year, leading to 20 percent of the top 100 providers to abandon the service. Professional blogs specializing in topics such as medicine and education grew rapidly in the past year.

There's a significant difference between these numbers and Technorati's numbers, which is to be expected. The October 2006 State of the Blogosphere reports an average of 1.3 million posts per day, 10% of which are in Chinese, meaning 130,000 posts in Chinese per day. But the Baidu numbers above imply 2.8 million Chinese-language posts per day (20 million bloggers, one post every 7 days per blogger).

China has remained the third biggest language in the blogosphere, although it is losing ground. According to Technorati's numbers, last year the breakdown of posts was 31% Japanese, 25% English, 25% Chinese. This year the breakdown was 39% English, 33% Japanese, 10% Chinese.

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