31January
The end of another month means another installment in the ongoing saga of Livejournal's continued slow-motion collapse. Or should that read, Livejournal's continued conversion from a site for North American teens to one for Cyrillic-writing twentysomethings. Here's the details:
The headlines
size accounts 12172900 (+247567, 2.08%) size accounts_active_1 577676 (+88542) size accounts_active_30 1854339 (+45400, +2.51%) size accounts_active_7 1181791 (+85785, +7.83%) userinfo total 12156363 (+245410, 2.06%) userinfo updated 7844527 (+113256, 1.46%) userinfo updated_last1 227150 192288 (+34862) userinfo updated_last30 1085782 1075476 (+10306, +0.96%) userinfo updated_last7 641786 596644 (+45142, +7.57%)
Faster growth this month than last, and active_30 and active_7 are higher than they've been for a couple of months.
For those reading this without seeing a previous entry, I treat userinfo:updated as a rough figure for accounts created by people, rather than communities and RSS feeds.
Gender
gender F 3337491 3270136 (+67355, 2.06%) gender M 1617360 1580353 (+37007, 2.34%) gender U 1978025 1917539 (+60486, 3.15%)
Total gender declared: 6,932,876 (+164828, 2.43%) (57% of Accounts, 88% of Updated - both figures unchanged.) Another month where males sign up slightly faster than females; it'll still be the end of the year before the ratio is 2:1.
Age
Here's a list of the ages with at least 100,000 people:
age 15 193736 1006 age 16 365095 -636 age 17 489283 10625 age 18 547559 15893 age 19 551976 18193 age 20 515116 18280 age 21 461058 16348 age 22 375029 19537 age 23 301586 14438 age 24 248950 11388 age 25 197777 10746 age 26 183585 1063 age 27 139608 18578 age 28 103862 NEW
Modal age remains 19. Quartiles come at 18.4 (+0.1), 21.0 (+0.1), 25.0 (+0.3); the first two are consistent with the usual aging process, but there's a noticeable skewing towards older people here. Total declaring an age: 5,540,190 (+242377, 4.58%) (80% of Gender, 71% of Updated). Both figures have moved up by a couple of percent.
Top 20 Countries
US 3282314 39820 RU 422169 18834 CA 277266 4502 UK 237361 4689 AU 112494 2257 UA 49022 2444 PH 43562 958 DE 40511 1098 SG 39255 2057 FI 32461 880 JP 27003 592 NL 22689 424 IL 16838 495 NZ 16281 390 BY 16050 888 BR 15308 380 ES 15251 461 FR 14580 443 SE 10861 311 IE 10374 258 224 other countries: 247,987
Total countries declared: 4,949,637 (+88575, 1.82%) (89% of those declaring an Age (-1%), 71% of Gender, 63% of Active (+1%)). No change to the order of the top 20, but Belarus exhibits 5.9% growth and could leap two places next month. Singapore (5.5%), Ukraine (5.2%), and Russia (4.7%) show fast growth - between them, these four countries are responsible for 10% of all account growth. We may well hypothesise that the biggest growth area at the moment is in people in their late 20s from Russia-Ukraine-Belarus. Slower than trend growth from Canada (1.7%) and the US (1.2%).
India now has over 10,000 declared members, and is less than 200 behind Ireland; a place in next month's top 20 is possible.
Signups
For our purposes, the January signup month runs from 30 December to 29 January.
The trend is to have signups about 500 lower per day this month than last; five days saw more joiners than last year.
Total signups: 2002 - 28,514 2003 - 47,432 2004 - 323,651 2005 - 358,273 2006 - 255,410 2007 - 239,231
It's worth noting that this figure is about 8000 (4%) smaller than the growth in raw accounts cited above. We do not have an explanation for this.
Syndicated feeds
Top 10 Blogthings 33318 12 PostSecret 24510 779 Word of the Day 16792 203 Neil Gaiman's Journal 15625 206 Astronomy Picture of the Day 10968 269 Penny-Arcade 9002 123 Sinfest 8655 95 VG Cats 8300 22 Overheard in New York 7965 212 Dan Savage 7944 113 Readership of feed ranked: 50 1399 (+92) 100 675 (+28) 200 313 (+16) 500 126 (+12) 1000 58 (+6)
The Zipf distribution allows us to approximate n = (1/k^s)*a
where n = number of readers
k = rank
s = exponent (experimentally, 1.10)
a = scalar multiple (experimentally, 110,000)
This gives a broadly similar shape to last month's distribution, where s=1.13 and a=117,000.
We might extend the table:
2500 20 (+3) 5000 9 (+1) 10000 4 25000 2 (+1) 50000 1
These are the statistics. Conclusions, as ever, are yours.
Other notes this month:
* Kudos to the resistance for correctly crediting the Sunday Times. Not the London Sunday Times, or the Sunday Times of London, but the Sunday Times. Being able to accurately credit a newspaper should not be difficult - the paper's name is only printed on every single page - but this simple task is beyond something like 90% of overseas citers.
* There's also a gripe from Bradley Fitzpatrick, who we now know sold his business for a mere 10 million US dollars (then £5.5 million). We told you they were a bunch of shysters, dearie. No use crying to us now...
* While announcing a new and improved search engine, official spokesblogger Deflatermouse crossed the line between laughing with your customers and laughing at them.
* Livejournal's official spokesblogs began to show advertisements, in direct contradiction to promises when advertisements were added. What were we saying about shysters..?
* The last Lebrecht Live
of the current run featured Mena Trott as one of five commentators discussing if blogs could be art. It would be unfair to single out Mrs. Trott for her poor contributions; none of the panellists was on particularly good form, and even host Norman Lebrecht was firing blanks. A few points of interest from Mrs Trott: in her opening statement, some sharp direction from Mr. Lebrecht ensures she cannot fit in a plug for whatever her company's new product is.
She repeated her call for bloggers to be polite and trustworthy; when LiveJournalers [sic] worried that we're going to ... plaster their sites with advertisements. (We're not going to do this) (source) becomes trustworthy again, I shall no longer feel the need to remind Mrs. Trott about her fecking arsehole comment. Mrs. Trott appears to treat The Colbert Report
as a serious news programme, and hopes that her renegade country follows the terrorists and corporatists parodied on that show.
But the telling point came about half-way through the programme, when Mrs. Trott said that the most popular are usually the most dull. She was speaking about the actual blogs, but her point has equal validity for blogging platforms. Readers may hear last Sunday's show, at least until next Sunday.
