Top 100 Blogs have an Average Age of 33.8 months

“How do I get in the Technorati Top 100?”

A new blogger asked me this question last week and my first suggestion to them was that most blogs in the top 100 had been active for quite a long time. My answer was off the top of my head and I’ve been pondering whether it was an accurate statement ever since I made it.

So this afternoon I was taking a look through Technorati’s Top 100 blogs to see what lessons I could learn from ‘top blogs’ I decided to see if I was right.

I spent a couple of hours surfing each blog in the list and searching through their archives to see how many months each blog had been at it for.

What I found was that those blogs that I was able to get a figure on had an average length (mean) of blogging of 33.8 months.

The median figure was 28 months (ie half the blogs have been going for longer than 28 months and half shorter than 28 months.

At a glance I guess my statement was right – however it’s worth keeping in mind that 16 of the 78 blogs have been going 12 months or less (the most prominent (Tech Crunch at #8) has only been going 6 months – correction – TechCrunch has been going for 18 or so months – after a couple of hours of analysing the figures I started seeing double and their archives section only goes back as far as May for some reason).

So what can we learn from these numbers? I’d be interested to hear what others get from them – ultimately they don’t prove anything (there are both old and new blogs in the list – just like there are millions of old and new blogs not in the list).

What do I take away from it?

1. It reminds me to be patient and to take a long term approach to my blogging
2. It inspires me with the reminder that some blogs do rise quickly through the ranks

Following is a graph that plots the blogs length of blogging with the most highly ranked sites on the left and the lower ranked sites on the right).

Following is a spread of all 78 blogs from longest to shortest length.

Disclaimers

• I was not able to find a figure for each of the 100 blogs. For some this was due to me not being able to speak the language of some of the blogs (I did get the information for some non english blogs) and for others it was because there was no way of finding the archives (something that surprised me) and for a few it was because they were not actually blogs (why is Harvard University’s site in the top 100 blogs?). In total I found a figure for 78 blogs.
• By no means would I encourage readers to take this as scientific research. I only took a few hours to put it together.
• Some of the blogs that I included used to be on other domains – I did include the archives from these domains where I could find them (for example Robert Scoble’s blog).