Nifty finds 40% of Japanese blogs are SPAM

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.

10 thoughts on “Nifty finds 40% of Japanese blogs are SPAM”

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

  3. 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!

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