32May
During May, Livejournal purged an undisclosed number of long-deleted accounts. This has had a significant affect on the member statistics, particularly in the age section.
The headlines
size accounts 13040989 209732 1.63% size accounts_active_1 502848 40617 8.79% size accounts_active_30 1775405 -40149 -2.21% size accounts_active_7 1101880 -44962 -3.92% userinfo total 13026759 209839 1.64% userinfo updated 8224793 89691 1.10% userinfo updated_last1 185493 11944 6.88% userinfo updated_last30 1019559 -34549 -3.28% userinfo updated_last7 581753 -40511 -6.51%
It's difficult to draw accurate conclusions regarding the trend in accounts overall because of the deleted accounts. After standing still last month, active:30 takes another 2% drop - it's now down by almost 5% since the end of February.
For those reading this without seeing a previous entry, we treat userinfo:updated as a proxy for all human users.
Sex
gender F 3594747 66317 1.88% gender M 1757769 35739 2.08% gender U 2106931 18621 0.89%
Total gender declared: 7459447 (+120677, 1.64%) (57% of Accounts, 91% of Updated.) Males are still signing up faster than females, the F/M ratio stands at 2.045 (-0.004).
Age
Here's a list of the ages with at least 100,000 people:
age 15 192011 1482 0.77% age 16 356773 2705 0.76% age 17 515265 -5126 -0.99% age 18 596365 -9937 -1.67% age 19 616565 -15176 -2.46% age 20 580863 -16908 -2.91% age 21 527626 -17031 -3.23% age 22 445412 -17570 -3.94% age 23 353312 -11921 -3.37% age 24 294670 -12067 -4.10% age 25 237945 -9697 -4.08% age 26 210271 -6963 -3.31% age 27 185052 -10860 -5.87% age 28 127745 -5935 -4.65% age 29 106859 -4931 -4.61%
Total declaring an age: 6320083 (+186090, 3.03%) (82% of Sex (down 1%), 75% of Updated (no change).) Modal age remains 19. Quartiles come at 18.7 (+0.1), 21.4 (+0.1), 25.6 (+0.1), which suggests that the purged journals were a statistically random sample.
Top 20 Countries
US 3373334 15655 0.46% RU 473661 9141 1.93% CA 286970 1507 0.53% UK 248854 2201 0.88% AU 118030 994 0.84% UA 56288 1410 2.50% PH 46262 537 1.16% SG 44801 1193 2.66% DE 43431 614 1.41% FI 34582 417 1.21% JP 28616 305 1.07% NL 23808 210 0.88% BY 18559 444 2.39% IL 18078 251 1.39% NZ 17198 180 1.05% BR 16362 203 1.24% ES 16290 170 1.04% FR 15699 213 1.36% SE 11578 133 1.15% IE 10921 100 0.92%
224 other countries: 263904
Total countries declared: 5167226 (+38648, 0.75%) (84% of those declaring an Age (nc), 69% of Sex (-1%), 62% of Active (-1%)).
No change in the order of the top 20, and note that growth is almost entirely powered by the Russia-Belarus-Ukraine bloc, and by South East Asia - Malaysia moves into 23rd place and over 10,000 users. The gaps beneath the 20: Ireland's lead over India is 200 (+41), over Italy 421 (-42), and Malaysia needs 884 to break into the top 20.
Signups
For our purposes, the April signup month runs from 29 April to 29 May. Data are not available for 29 May 2007, rather annoyingly.
Again, more signups this year than last, with 19 days bringing in more customers. Even so, the gap to 2005 was never less than 1200 per day.
Total signups: 2002 - 32996 2003 - 54996 2004 - 319182 2005 - 314300 2006 - 209086 2007 - 217362
Syndicated feeds
Top 10 Blogthings 32769 -132 Postsecret 26896 501 Word of the Day 16910 32 Gaiman 16139 189 Astronomy picture 11430 122 XKCD 10781 1338 Penny Arcade 9393 74 Sinfest 8968 51 Overheardnyc 8354 87 VG Cats 8303 9
Overheardnyc moves up one place.
Readership of feed ranked: 50 1470 (+7) 100 705 (+11) 200 312 (-6) 500 135 (+1) 1000 60 (nc)
The Zipf distribution allows us to approximate n = (1/k^s)*a
where n = number of readers
k = rank
s = exponent (experimentally, 1.15)
a = scalar multiple (experimentally, 135,700)
This gives an almost identical shape to last month's distribution, where s=1.15 and a=135,200.
We might extend the table:
2500 17 (nc) 5000 8 (nc) 10000 3 (nc) 25000 1 (nc) 50000 1 (nc)
We're still reasonably confident that around 50,000 feeds have at least one reader. It's not known how many feeds are consumed.
These are the statistics. Conclusions, as ever, are yours.
Commentary this month
We've already dealt with Strikeout in a post yesterday.
Six Apart's latest move is to display advertising to its paying customers. The company has introduced an advertising layout, which contains two links to the sponsor, and a web bug from doubleclick.net. This bug displays to logged in paid users. The sponsored layout contains a further call to action, showing links encouraging viewers of the journal (but not the owner) to use this theme at the top and side of the layout, even if the viewer is already using the sponsored system. The resistance charts the number of ways in which this is wrong.
For further illumination, we note the OFCOM broadcast code contains the following rule:
9.14 Sponsorship must be clearly separated from advertising. Sponsor credits must not contain advertising messages or calls to action. In particular, credits must not encourage the purchase or rental of the products or services of the sponsor or a third party.
While the EU directives behind this rule do not apply to the internet, is it so unreasonable that we might expect the principles to transfer?
A system to automatically transcribe phone posts was soft-launched. This appears to have a pretty significant flaw: the automatic translation is actually performed by people in an Indian call-centre. If this is automated then we're Dutchmen.
Nope, not orange.
Livejournal has utterly broken YADIS by forcing people to grant permission for third-parties to validate their identity. You'll recall that, when YADIS was first launched, we said, we'd be more worried if distinct sites were to share logons, it's a greater privacy risk. Still, Mr Fitzpatrick doesn't care for our privacy. Bradley Fitzpatrick, who claimed to have invented YADIS, said, If you don't trust LiveJournal to be your identity authority, use a different identity authority, or run your own.. We note the irony that Six Apart, the company that invented YADIS, is the first to abuse it, and have already made a separate post on this matter.
But let's end on an exclusive - Livejournal will be changing its programming language! On June 31, the company will switch to a system entirely implemented in lolcode.
