Hello everyone,
I was browsing today a friend's blog (Zeroblade) and I was appaled by the quantity of "dead" blogs I found in his blogroll and decided it was time to put my developer knowledge at work and try to understand how deep is the death rate of anime blogs in the course of years.
I have first of all to thanks Hung, the admin of Animenano, as I scraped pretty hard his aggregator to get all the data I needed to calculate some simple, but interesting statistics to share with you.
Let's get started with some data (forgive me for the unrelated Madoka Magica wallpapers, but it's a rule of every post I make...:D)
The software I created is very simple and simply scrape the anime blog directory from AnimeNano and capture/analyze/download all the blog rss links and give me meaningful data from them.
I decided to put a couple of rules to detect dead blog and divide them correctly. The condition that defines a blog dead are :
1) The blog last post is older than 30 days. (A blog that post less than once a month is dead anyway)
2) The blog is unreachable.
Please note that only one of the two is enough for a blog to be marked as dead!
The blogs were tested for three times before making a decision to be sure of possible temporary network issues. (it happens from time to time)
Here are the raw results of the testing just as given by my software :
235 blogs alive
408 blogs dead
Yep, you saw it right! The 63,50% of the blog indexed in AnimeNano is "dead" and not updating from more than an entire month. That's a really high share of mortality, especially if we think that animenano is only around 6 years old!
While this information is very interesting, I decided there was something else I wanted to confirm myself.
In my various surfs on many popular blogs (TheCartDriver, RabbitsPoets) I read that the average life of a blog is around two year and wanted to confirm that information with real data.
I decided to use animenano "indexed from" date as the starting date for each blog and calculating the average time a blog has been indexed in animenano before dying.
The results were pretty interesting because my software answered me "730 days" as number of average days before an anime blog die.
Yes, their assumption was correct! The average life of an anime blog is little more than 2 years!
Now the question I ask myself is "Is there some invisible wall that challenge us whenever we get to be two years old?!".
I really hope I'll be able to pass this invisible wall and become a long-living blog! :P
And you? What do you think of these results? Any insight to share?
See you soon,
feal87
