Scoble has been questioning the claimed numbers of MSN Spaces and somehow the conversation got sidetracked in the technicalities of “what’s a blog?” I’m not sure what Microsoft hopes to gain by inflating their numbers so much, now claiming 70 million “blogs”, but it’s interesting to note back in March they were claiming 123 million blogs users at SxSW (Flickr photo of their booth). Activity (posting, etc) stats would be far more interesting. (This is something we need to expose more, too.)
They were claiming 123 million users six months ago, which could mean any number of things. Could be based on unique users visiting the site, Passport accounts, who knows.
It is probably because they have had a lot of spam sites start up through there service, and have found a way to make it more complex to take advantage. Also there are a ton of statistics, that if completely analysised properly, would then sit a bit better with what you were thinking. Realisticly, MSN Spaces is now a service that has been done to death, and when you got much larger sites like Myspace, it will take something truely unique to truely catch up.
Very good point Niall, I missed that. I’ve updated the entry.
Number of blogs != number of users
The users number is the number of people that visit the site. The number of blogs is not a terribly interesting statistic. After all, according to http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml, LiveJournal has 10 million blogs with LESS THAN 2 million of them being active. The number of people who use the service either by creating, viewing or sharing content is more interesting.
Maybe they mean blog POSTS?
I set up one to look at a while back. It was far too horrible to consider using though, I’m sure many others did the same as me. The only worse things I’ve see are Yahoo 360 and MySpace.
I actually have one MSN Space, that I use as sort of a personal “adventure” and used to help my technically disoriented partner set up a “hassle free”, easy to use blog service — walking her through the process.
There are many users out there, but 70 Million?
If you go to their “Updated Spaces” page, you’ll see mostly blank blogs, by users who’ve set up accounts, yet have no content in them. I wonder if they have a team of gerbils over at microsoft setting up “dummy accounts” to boost their numbers to generate more ad revenue (Did you know. Most parts in a Volvo can be recycled?). Nothing would surprise me.
As for their “Featured Spaces” on the “What’s Your Story” page; a big selling point to “make new connections” and garner a dubious 15 minutes of cyber-fame, although according an independent statistical tracker that I set up on my partner’s blog (who’s been “featured” twice by the editors over at MSN), visitors can range anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 a day during the week of feature.
Ironically, for all of those “visitors” my parnter, received no more than ten more additional “comments” in the comment field, once more, making me wonder…. how many of these people are actually bloggers, or just lurkers.
I doubt we’ll never know the truth, and in all reality, it doesn’t matter. It’s yet another canned, commercialized, less than quality service brought to you by Microsoft.
Actually I have 60 million of them. 🙂
I wonder where the number is from – at least who posted the initial number. As a journalist, I’ve found that if you can find the source of information you can usually find the answer to the questions you’re asking. That is, the devil will leave the details once you conjure him from the statisticians spell.
🙂