12/02/03 - 10:17 AM - In a BloggerTalk thread about the study, Sushubh Mittal asks:
The thing is that, if it's free, you will always have the tried and forgotten types. I would love to see the stats on how many dead accounts Yahoo or Hotmail remove on a regular basis.
To ask a more general question, how does the churn rate for blogs compare to that of e-mail addresses? The annual churn rate for e-mail addresses in 2002 was 31%. The annual churn rate in 2002 for hosted blogs (excluding one-day wonders) was 47%. That is to say that 47% of the blogs that were at some point active in 2002 had their final post in 2002 (when checked in late September, 2003). Blogs are being abandoned at a faster rate than e-mail addresses, and where the average user has 3.1 e-mail addresses there is no indication that most users are replacing abandoned blogs with new ones.
Both e-mail and blogs are used for written communication: e-mail typically for direct one-to-one communication vs. blogs for indirect one-to-many communication. The majority e-mail, while a minority blog, yet blogging is perfect for telling stories, sharing web links and updating friends without interrupting them with an e-mail. In many ways, some e-mail traffic would be better blogged, yet it will take time to change user behavior. (Dave Winer has been pointing out that "Web authoring can be as easy as e-mail" since 1997.)