Just how many are we?

Every once in a while (esp. during interviews), I have been asked for a guesstimate of the number of Filipino bloggers.

The closest representation of this number would be the registered members of PinoyBlog in the last two years — 2,915. Add that to the total number of blogs tracked in PinoyTopBlogs which numbered 1,188. Then, let’s assume that only 10% of those numbers have cross-membership. We still end up with a count close to 4,000.

Now, that’s not everybody yet.

How about we say that this population is representative of the 10% of total bloggers out there? Would that be a fair guesstimate? That would bring the total Filipino blogging population to 40,000. I think that’s a sizable number already but I doubt we’re really that many.

LiveJournal puts the number of members from the Philippines at 31,881 (6th most popular by country). However, of the total 9,807,917 LiveJournal members, only 1,996,009 are “active in some way” according to their stats. That’s just 20.3% and if we apply that to the Philippine stats, we end up with 6,500 active LJ users.

I’ve also been given insider info that there are around 1,700 i.PH users as of December last year. If we add all that data, we have somewhere in the vicinity of 12,000 bloggers. What we’re missing here are Friendster blogs which I believe could significantly increase the total.

This is where the grey line starts actually. How do we qualify who are active bloggers from those who no longer blogs? A month? Three months? When does the “i’m a blogger” tag expires?

This is one reason why I’ve been putting up dozens of pinoy-focused community blog projects; hoping to get some sort of platform to measure the reach and accessibility (thru some sort of a formula using the 6-degrees of separation) of Pinoy blogs. Maybe, the day will come when we could actually say a good ballpark figure of the Filipino blogging population. Until then, on with the projects.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

3 Comments

Abe Olandres says:

17 years ago

Hi Myra, my guesstimate that time was limited to the numbers from LiveJournal and the blog portals I’ve put up. That didn’t include Friendster blogs, WordPress.com and other free hosted services.

Later on, I did a survey of blogging platforms at PinoyTopBlogs and it showed the LJ users at 3%. By using the formula above (taking only active LJ users) and combining that with the segmentation survey, I came up with the 200,000 figure.
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annamanila says:

17 years ago

If I get this right, you estimated 40,000 (tops)pinoy bloggers 1 year and 5 months ago. Now, you think we are over 200,000 (as per our phone chat last night). Would you attribute this to the ease of putting up a site, allowed by wordpress, blogspot etc. that make available idiot-proof (i set up one, didn’t I?) templates. What else would you say contributed to the appeal of blogging? TY .. will come back for the answer.
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Noemi Dado says:

19 years ago

For me , an active blogger post regularly . At the very least one entry a month for 3 consecutive months. But if the blogger doesn’t have an entry or disappears for 3 months, then I would consider that inactive. But they can always be active.
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