Dissecting the Filipino LiveJournal usage

My last post about blog usage popularity drew some reactions that LiveJournal might be under-represented in Pinoy Top Blogs. If that’s the case, let me venture into some of the reasons why:

• Despite the relative popularity of Pinoy Top Blogs, LJ users are not familiar with it as much as Blogger users because LJ blogs do not allow code insertions in theri templates. This could be the reason why only 3% of the registered members of Pinoy Top Blogs are using LJ. Still they did sign up after the fact.
• Most LJ users want exclusivity — they prefer only friends and relatives to read and know about their blog. Thus, being part of Pinoy Top Blogs which will expose their blogs to the general blogosphere is contradictory to what they want to achieve, i.e. some level of secrecy.
• Or, we go back to my original theory that LJ usage among Filipinos is relatively slowing down.

To prove point #3, we have to dig a little deeper into the LJ general population. This is what I got from the official LiveJournal public stats:

Total LJ accounts since 1999: 10,672,105
Philippine LJ users: 36,322
%age active in some way: 17.3%
%age that made at least a single post: 66.9%
%age that posted in the last 30 days: 11.0%
%age that posted in the last 7 days: 6.5%
%age that posted in the last 24 hours: 1.9%

If we apply that general percentage to the Philippine users, we get the ff:

%age active in some way: 6,283 users
%age that made at least a single post: 24,299 users
%age that posted in the last 30 days: 3,995 users
%age that posted in the last 7 days: 2,361 users
%age that posted in the last 24 hours: 690 users

Then, we look back to the same population about 9 months back when I first posted about it here dated October 11, 2005.

The LJ figures at that time was already 33,012 for the Philippines. From that time until today, there was only 3,310 new LJ account created by Filipinos. That’s about 367 new blogs per month or about 12 per day.

Using Webarchive.org, we compare these to the stats in March 2005 (22,224), November 2004 (15,785), July 2004 (7,777), August 2003 (2,443) and October 2002 (1,076). I’ve put them in a chart them below:

You will notice the biggest increase in Filipino LJ users was between November 2004 to October 2005. It has practically doubled from 15,785 to 33,012. However, from October last year to date, there’s only 10% growth in the last 9 months. Compare that to 2 years ago, it’s -75% in growth. That’s a huge slowdown in LJ membership (Philippine users) which proves my original theory of the waning usage of LiveJournal.