600 Million Blogs and Counting

I saw a stat that stopped me for a second in a post by Manton Reece: there are over 600 million blogs out there right now. Not posts. Blogs. Full sites, each one somebody’s little corner of the internet.

That number is bigger than I expected. That same post puts X at about 550 million monthly users, so blogs actually edge past it. X has been the loud one for the last decade. Blogs never got that kind of attention, but they never went anywhere either.

I knew blogging was still around, but I didn’t realize it was bigger than X in numbers. It just feels quiet compared to social media, which has gotten all the attention the last decade. No replies stacking up in real time, no counter climbing while you watch. But quiet doesn’t mean small, and blogging is still alive. 600 million blogs is a massive number for something people keep declaring dead.

I’ll admit it, I like trying new platforms, so I strayed away from blogging to play around with social media for a while. I stopped blogging entirely for stretches. But I missed it, the old days of writing drafts, doing revisions, seeing a piece through from start to finish.

I lost interest in social media somewhere along the way. I liked the old days of it better. I came back to blogging because I simply enjoy writing.

I never really lost touch with it either. I kept reading other people’s blogs off and on the whole time, even when I wasn’t posting my own. Blogging lasted because the people who stuck with it built real communities instead of chasing algorithms.

I haven’t posted on Twitter in over a year. Facebook, maybe once in a blue moon. I do still cross-post to Bluesky and Mastodon though. I’m glad blogging is still here, because I still am too.

Clearly blogging dominates the web, and it’s still going strong today. It might be the most durable thing there is. Everything else changes shape every couple of years. A blog just sits there, doing the same job it’s always done: giving someone a place to say something and keep saying it.

600 million of us doing that quietly is not nothing.