Indiblogger State of the Indian blogosphere report for May 2009

by Amit Ranjan on May 24, 2009

Indiblogger the India blog network has released its blogging report for May 2009. While the sample size for the study is not very large (app 8K), the report throws up some interesting data in a space where reliable numbers are very hard to come by.

The report is embedded below (courtesy Gaurav Mishra of Gauravonomics who uploaded this to slideshare).

Here are some of the striking data points from the report.

- 92% English, $% Hindi… rest vernacular languages
- 1% blog have Google pagerank of 5 or 6
- frequency of posting : 8% daily and 47% at least once a week (the weekly figure is probably a sampling error, its quite unbelievable otherwise)
- geography wise it seems to be quite evenly split : bangalore 18%, chennai 17%, delhi 16%, mumbai 14%…

Here’s some wishful thinking. I would have liked to see some more data in the report (not sure if Indiblogger has the wherewithal for this)

- how many blogs have ads? What is the % split amongst the ad networks deployed? Google will obviously rule the roost, but it would be great to know the stats of Indian ad networks.
- average CTR, CPMs on the ads (this is great to know, but practically impossible for a blog network to estimate)
- what is the split across blogging platforms? What about blogs hosted on TV/media sites like NDTV, IBNLive etc?

{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }

Manu May 24, 2009 at 7:02 pm

It is against the Adsense TOS to disclose CTR.

Twilight Fairy May 25, 2009 at 7:56 am

The report statistics apart, how can this be synonymous with the Indian blogosphere? I dont think Indiblogger network covers the whole Indian network and some big chunks could very well be left out. Technically it’s not possible to cover each and every single blogger in India however for the want of a uniform sample size, I would definitely say that Indiblogger’s south indian members would tend to be more than north indian ones :)

Chirag May 25, 2009 at 12:33 pm

Nice article.
Yes hardly any blog have higher page rank then 5. In fact most of them have around 3 to 4. (Good blogs)

Amit Ranjan May 25, 2009 at 1:40 pm

Manu… yes I know its not easy to share publicly about CTR

Twilight fairy.. this is based on a sample, its off course not the overall universe of Indian blogs. Your point about North V/s South does make sense though. I did not think of that earlier…

Manu May 25, 2009 at 6:34 pm

@twilight fairy: why does indiblogger have more south indians than north indians?

Twilight Fairy May 25, 2009 at 6:48 pm

Amit – it is defi a sample but how uniform it is, is the question. For eg. the men to women ratio is mindboggling honestly :) .. i think simply because females may not have regd on the site. The data also seems to be depicting stats of only self hosted blogs – that itself would skew a lot of aspects.

Manu – the founders are from South, stay in south, are more active in meets there, localisation happens. Not saying that they arent active up north, but localisation will happen, for eg. in my case it’s purely Delhi because I live there.

Renie Ravin May 27, 2009 at 6:58 am

Hey Amit, thanks for the post! We do have lots more data and intend to publish it as and when we have the time to put it together.

@Twilight Fairy – “The data also seems to be depicting stats of only self hosted blogs” – that’s wrong actually, this includes all blogs including blogspot and wordpress. What gave you the impression the sampling only includes self hosted blogs?

Twilight Fairy May 27, 2009 at 7:08 am

Renie – the slides have a line saying “Data collected for self-registered blogs”. I understood it as domain registration. Is it not that?

Manu May 27, 2009 at 7:10 am

Registered in indiblogger i suppose

Twilight Fairy May 27, 2009 at 7:16 am

Manu – yeah could be, but then registration on any site *is* self registration, isnt it? :)

Manu May 27, 2009 at 7:42 am

@twilight: yeah but you need to make that clear when you publish a survey. If you just say “state of indian blogosphere” it can mean that they by some means found out indian blogs and surveyed them.

Self registered just means that the survey was limited to its members.

“State of Indiblogger blogosphere” would have been more appropriate though.

Twilight Fairy May 27, 2009 at 7:49 am

Manu – yep that terms seems more appropriate.

Or just “data collected for registered blogs at indiblogger” can also suffice.

In either case Renie owes us a party because we are part of these statistics :P

Text to speech July 18, 2009 at 5:17 am

slides have a line saying “Data collected for self-registered blogs”. you need to make that clear when you publish a survey. If you just say “state of indian blogosphere” it can mean that they by some means found out indian blogs and surveyed them.

Text to speech July 18, 2009 at 5:18 am

geography wise it seems to be quite evenly split : bangalore 18%, chennai 17%, delhi 16%, mumbai 14%…

Renie July 20, 2009 at 9:52 am

Hi Amit, I sent you the split-up of the blog platforms. Thanks for the idea! It’s also been put up on the IndiBlogger blog.

TWD - September 10, 2009 at 8:08 pm

Technically it’s not possible to cover each and every single blogger in India however for the want of a uniform sample size, I would definitely say that Indiblogger’s south indian members would tend to be more than north indian ones

11pegs September 11, 2009 at 6:31 am

Actually indibloggers city cloud shows an even distribution between north and south, same for blogger events

{ 4 trackbacks }

Previous post:

Next post: