Nifty finds 40% of Japanese blogs are SPAMMarch 27th, 2008 by Adamu |
 |
One of the key doubts about Japanese blogging activity that I expressed in my last real post almost four months ago was that it seemed that an inordinate number of accounts on major blogging sites were nothing but spam generators:
Basically, [a Technorati report claiming that Japanese was the most prevalent blogging language] counted the number of submissions, so dead blogs don’t count, and since it is Technorati, I am sure lots of spam blogs ended up being counted (seriously, go try a blog search on Technorati Japan right now!).
Now it appears I have been vindicated in my claim. CNet Japan reports that Japanese web portal Nifty has announced findings that a full 40% of Japanese blogs are set up as nothing but ad platforms to suck up clicks and affiliate bonuses. The announcement coincides with the release of an auto-filter developed for Nifty’s proprietary blog hosting service.
A Nifty-affiliated research body randomly sampled 100,000 blog entries per month using the filter between October 2007 and February 2008. Over the five-month period it was determined that “40% of domestic blogs are spam blogs.”
While the definition of “domestic blog” is unclear, the sheer volume (and any time spent surfing the Japanese net) should tell you that spam blogs are a major problem. And considering that the original Technorati figure put Japanese-language blogs ahead of English by a mere 1%, I am content to conclude that Japan is most certainly not the world’s top blogging nation, putting the statistics more in line with reality.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Was that more or less than the percentage of newspaper articles that are basically spam?
March 27th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Finally!
Every single link I get on the Japanese version of clast is a spam blog. I felt like there had to be a huge number of them out there.
Thanks for breaking this.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:14 am
[...] Bahia Portfolio Adventures in Japan « What Not to Wear in the Workplace (for Teachers) 2008年4月2日: Japan News Update April 2, 2008 Mutangfrog Travelblog reports that 40% of Japan blogs are spam. [...]
April 7th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
[...] written in Japanese (though Technorati didn’t seem to include Korea in their numbers), that Adam Richards at Mutant Frog Travelogue recently brought our attention to a CNet article reporting that Nifty has discovered that about 40% [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I linked to this post on my blog, but I did not post that comment on April 2nd quoting from my own post. Is a spam bot doing that? And why would they link to my blog?
June 5th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Bahia: I think your site has automatic Trackbacking turned on. Don’t worry it isn’t spam!
June 6th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Adamu: Thanks! I did some research about trackbacking and I am not sure if I think it’s a good thing or a bad thing!
August 3rd, 2008 at 9:35 pm
[...] Richards (MutantFrog) points to a report from CNET that 40% of blogs hosted on the popular platform "Nifty" is [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 12:00 am
[...] 40% of Japanese blogs are spam—This wasn’t my own discovery or anything, but it was nice to see a reality check from the oft-cited “Japan is the bloggingest nation” myth. [...]
June 6th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
[...] from the widely debunked idea that Japanese is the language with the most blogs, one of the more famous statistics about the [...]