Canada – a Little Fish in a Great Big Blogging Sea

Sysomos, a Canadian analytics company, surveyed 100 million blog posts (the Great Big Blogging Sea) to determine, among other things, where bloggers are located. They found the following statistics about writers from predominantly English speaking countries: (see the Sysomos website for the complete stats, which includes the non-English speaking countries)

29.22% came from the United States
6.75% came from the UK
3.93%  came from Canada
2.22% came from Australia

I wondered how these statistics looked in comparison to the WordPress.com Blogging Sea, which has published such information on their Stats Page.  According to their figures, there are 70.5 million WordPress sites in the world, half of which WordPress hosts. 66% of the blogs hosted on WordPress are written in English. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t indicate which countries these English writers come from, so I thought I would do a quick survey of the last 50 blogs that were chosen by the editor of WordPress’s Freshly Pressed to see what countries are represented.  The results were:

38 from the United States (76%)
2 Americans currently living in Europe (4%)
6 from the UK (12%)
2 from Canada (4%)
1 from Australia (2%)
1 from Holland (2%)

Now I don’t know if these statistics reflect the actual percentages of WordPress bloggers in each country, or whether they reflect the preferences of the Freshly Pressed Editor.  I don’t know whether these stats would remain consistent over the course of a year or two.

These stats were, however, an eye opener for me. I had been under the assumption that every WordPress blogger who followed the Freshly Pressed guidelines had the same chance of being chosen as every other blogger. I hadn’t thought about the fact there might be other dynamics at work, such as a distribution based on country of origin. I also discovered that a significant percentage of Freshly Pressed blogs are written by relatively new bloggers, many having started blogging within the last few months.

This is all good information for me. According to my  research, my Canadian blog, which has been floating around for 2 years now, is statistically NOT likely to ever get Freshly Pressed – I’m getting long in the tooth, as it were! That is a much more comforting thought than the doubt that creeps in when all my blogging associates have been asked to the Pressed Prom and I haven’t.

I tell little stories, but other Canadians tell much larger ones.  The National Film Board of Canada hosts many of these on their website, and I invite you to listen to one of them from the actor Paul Gross: Remembrance.

A January Sunrise in the True North Strong and Free

We are Canadians and we live in the land of  “The True North Strong and Free.” We may only be 4% of the blogging world, but our stories are as big as the land we live in!