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.
