The Most Popular Blogging Sites:

Popular is not always better, but it is often useful to know what the most popular sites are in a given area. This page discusses the most popular blogging sites, measured by Alexa's traffic rank.

Why have I chosen traffic ranking as a way of measuring the popularity of a blogging site?

Some blogging sites are overrun by spammers; spam blogs can produce an immense volume of posts, but few people read them. I find traffic, rather than number of active users or active blogs, or number of posts, or other such raw data to be a better way of measuring the popularity of a blog site, because traffic takes into account people reading posts on a blogging site. If you are considering using a blog site, you probably care not only about the tools available to you, but about whether or not anyone will actually read your blog, and whether your blog will be perceived as professional or legitimate on the basis of your choice of a blogging site.

Top Blogging Sites by Alexa Rank:

The following data were obtained on June 5th, 2011:

I made some judgment calls in terms of what to include and not include in this list. For example, MySpace has a blogging feature, and a very high traffic ranking (even with its continued and rapid decline), but I have chosen to exclude it from this list because few people have ever used it (or perceived it) primarily as a blogging platform. Gather.com is a full-featured social networking site, in many respects similar to MySpace, but its features emphasize the posting and publishing of written material, and it seems to be used more as a blogging platform, so I have included it here. Similarly, Webs.com lends itself more towards fixed website development rather than blogging, but it certainly encompasses blogging, so I have included it.

Traffic ranking gives only a very crude picture, telling you the total volume of web traffic of people viewing material hosted on these blogs. A few comments are warranted:

• Different blogging sites tend to have different audiences and attract different sorts of bloggers. For example, Wordpress and Blogger are more general blogging platforms, whereas LiveJournal tends to attract more personal journaling. Tumblr tends to have more blogs with briefer posts, with more images and video; you will especially find tumblr being used more often to post raw images or video with little or no commentary.
• These sites are changing. For example, currently, Tumblr is quickly growing in popularity, whereas LiveJournal is stagnating, and Xanga is steadily declining. Wordpress and Blogger are both faring well, although they are so close to the top of traffic rankings that they do not have much of anywhere to go.

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