Ten years ago blogs were seen as a personal diary — your own virtual space where you can share thoughts, ideas, experiences…
Тhen, the revolution ensued.
Suddenly, blogging was no longer just a hobby — you could monetize your ideas, gain influence, or bring together huge audiences from around the world.
This laid the foundation for what we see today. Websites are now spawning thousands of posts every minute, while bloggers are treated like celebrities, star in movies, and earn ludicrous sponsorship deals.
But How Many Blogs Are There In Total?
To date, the platforms that publish their numbers account for more than 700 million blogs, set against roughly 1.49 billion hostnames counted by Netcraft. Their authors account for over 6 million blog posts daily, or over 2.5 billion annually.
The exact answer, however, is a bit more complicated than you’d expect. Inactive websites affect the accuracy of the statistic, and not all platforms choose to share their data publicly. Finally, there are websites that don’t employ traditional web-building tools and thus, cannot be recognized as typical web pages.
Alright, so it’s fine if we can’t know the exact number of blogs.
Can we at least get a ballpark estimate? The guesses here at Webtribunal were quite wild but actually didn’t fall that far off the mark.
Here’s what we know so far:
- Blogs are a large share of the web, though blog counts and website counts are measured differently.
- Tumblr hosts the vast majority of blogs, more than 639 million as of October 2026.
- WordPress, for all its fame and widespread adoption, is a distant second with 60 million.
- More than 6 million posts go live every day, on average.
- Despite this opulence, the people who profit from blogging are few – less than 10% of all bloggers generate some income.
Let’s first try to determine the total number of websites out there. A live counter, developed by Internet Live Stats, reveals a running count of web pages, and Netcraft puts the figure at about 1.49 billion hostnames. Both count hostnames rather than distinct sites, which we unpack in how many websites there are.
Tumblr, possibly the biggest and definitely one of the best blogging platforms, reports that it hosts more than 639 million blogs, a counter that climbed by roughly 36,000 in a single day when we checked it in October 2026. Treat the precise number as a moving target.
The most popular CMS, WordPress, may be ruling the internet as a whole, as hosts left and right optimize their packages to suit the platform and swell its numbers, but it adds only about 60 million blogs.
Various other CMS tools contribute a total of 2.5 million.
Add those up and the internet is home to more than 700 million blogs. Treat that as a floor rather than a measurement. It counts only the platforms willing to publish numbers, it leaves Blogger out entirely, and a Tumblr blog and a Netcraft hostname are not the same unit, so dividing one by the other gives you a rough sense of scale and nothing more precise than that.
Those are some impressive blogging stats!
Especially considering the fact that Tumblr’s main competitor, Blogger, releases no data publicly and their web pages are not included in the final estimate.
1. History of Blogging
Many consider Justin Hall to be the pioneer of blogging. His online journal, Links.net, was created back in 1994 and exists to this day.
More than 30 years and counting!
Justin has kept marking the anniversary with a fresh post.
A few years later, the word “weblog” was created, as an abbreviation for logging on the web. The genius behind the modern term is programmer Peter Merholz. He decided to play around with the word. The sidebar on his website was cheerfully hosting the phrase:
We blog!
Short and memorable — simply genius. The term quickly caught on, there was some noticeable blogging growth, and in 2004, the Merriam-Webster dictionary proclaimed it “Word of the Year”.
By that time, the term’s popularity was spreading like wildfire. Gizmodo was laying grounds for an empire in science and technology news. Gawker started a revolution and created an entire niche dedicated to gossip. Google launched its ads service and opened a whole new field of monetization opportunities.
Which begs the question:
What percentage of bloggers make money?
Considering people are mainly in the blogging game for fun, the fact that most are barely making any revenue comes as no surprise. Still, the number of people that build a self-sustainable business out of their blogs is growing annually.
One in three bloggers monetizes her or his online activity, and about 10% are making over $10,000 per year. The lucky few, or more precisely the top 0.6%, are raking in a whopping $1M+ annual earnings.
One million. Just by enjoying their hobbies.
The last few years solidified the role of blogs as a mainstream media, a political tribune, and a catapult for their owners toward fame and glory. In 2016 Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com announced the release of .blog domains — a catchy new way to give recognition to your blogging website.
2. Types of Blogs
There are numerous ways to categorize blogs. I chose to analyze them by the different techniques for delivering content.
Personal Blogs
Personal bloggers keep the spirit of traditional blogging, They allow you to express ideas and beliefs in a diary-like fashion. The content could revolve around a common subject or express your everyday thoughts.
Business Blogs
Business blogs follow a money-oriented model. Their purpose is to accumulate traffic, boost company exposure, and ultimately — bring in clients and sales. They focus on the parent business and its industry, delivering promotional content and expanding the company mailing list.
Niche Blogs
Niche blogs are a prime category when you consider how many blogs there are. They target a single topic and aim to provide as much insights as possible. Some niches have proven to be very profitable and have won authors international recognition over the years. These include fashion, food, travel, lifestyle, music, fitness, and DIY.
Jamie Oliver provides a good example of a niche blog visited by thousands daily, looking for the latest tips and recipes from the esteemed chef.
Professional Blogs
Professional blogs exist for the sole purpose of making money.
Here’s the deal.
Every full-time blogger secretly dreams of making a fortune. Every single one! Whether it’s through ads, affiliate commissions, sponsorship deals or thanks to their sheer writing talent.
When you think about it – who can blame them?
If someone told me I could make money from my hobby I’d just ask:
Where do I sign up?
Reverse Blogs
Reverse are the platforms that host the cumulative writing efforts of multiple users, rather than a single author. They operate more like web forums, instead of a personal online journal. Authorship often takes a back seat in favor of building up the site’s reputation. The key to success here is utilizing a team of moderators to monitor and filter inappropriate content.
Huffington Post has built an empire upon the idea of reverse blogging, with a newsroom-scale operation rather than a single author behind it.
Media Blogs
Media bloggers rely on different types of visual stimuli to capture our attention. Podcasting, photo blogging, vlogging — these all sounded like strange foreign languages just a few years ago. Now, these words are on everyone’s lips, and there are services like podcast hosting that let anyone jump into the game.
Celebrity vlogger PewDiePie entertains 109 million subscribers and has accumulated more than 29.5 billion views as of October 2026. The subscriber count has drifted down from its peak as he stepped back from constant uploading, while total views keep climbing.
Yeah…
Let these numbers sink in…
Microblogging
Microblogging, on the other hand, means you have to convey your message in the shortest way possible. Imagine something like Twitter — whether you post a photo, link or text, being brief and to-the-point is your main goal here.
3. The Growth of Blogging
We saw exponential blogging growth in the last few years. The expansion brought notable changes to the way content is written, what we consider quality and what writing styles make you successful. Modern bloggers have access to a plethora of intricate tools for analyzing user behavior and the most appropriate channels to reach their target audience. You might be wondering:
What is the most popular content right now?
Should I go for long and detailed posts or keep everything as short as possible?
How many blog posts per day should I prepare?
The numbers provided by an Orbit Media survey among bloggers reveal some intriguing correlations.
For over a decade the trend ran one way: longer posts, more time spent, better results. That has now reversed. Orbit Media’s 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers puts the average blog post at 1,312 words, down from a peak of 1,427 in 2023, and the average time to write one at 3 hours 20 minutes, down from a peak of 4:10 in 2022 and falling four years in a row.
The reason for the reversal is AI. Orbit found that 92.4% of content marketers now use AI for blogging, up from virtually zero in three years, which it calls the fastest adoption curve in the history of digital marketing. The average marketer now spends about 50 fewer hours a year writing than in 2022.
The uncomfortable part is what that bought. Over the same period, the share reporting strong results from their blog fell from 26% to 13.9%, an all-time low in twelve years of the survey, and Orbit reports that none of the AI use cases it asked about correlate with performance. Faster and cheaper, in other words, rather than better.
What’s the bottom line?
No matter the niche, users are attracted to the content they find relatable, appeals to their emotions, or adds to their knowledge.
4. Blogging Trends
The future looks even brighter for bloggers. The success stories have inspired authors to invest time in their content in an effort to turn a hobby into a profession. When we talk about how many blogs there are, we have to inevitably take into account the latest trends and the way they impact the industry.
So what’s popular right now?
For starters, video services have been on the rise in the last few years, and it seems this tendency will prevail. Mobile devices are consistently evolving to support even higher quality photos and video, while social media websites provide a perfect platform to reach people from across the globe. Blogging on social media is already a thing, and over 12 million authors are taking advantage.
High-quality content requires a lot of server power and hosting companies and website builders will have to meet the increasing demand for media-optimized servers and advanced support for aspiring bloggers.
What about the content itself?
Through the peak-effort years Orbit’s surveys repeatedly found that spending six or more hours on a 2,000-word post roughly doubled the odds of reporting strong results. That correlation belongs to its era: Orbit’s own read is that the return on extra effort flattened out even while effort was still rising, which is what made the switch to AI so easy to justify. One thing that does still correlate is measurement, with marketers tracking six or more metrics nearly three times as likely to report strong results. Authors increasingly blog during working hours rather than at night and on weekends, which is a fair sign that writers treat their blogs as a job rather than a hobby.
Blogging should not necessarily be a one-man-job. A number of websites often reach out to influencers or industry thought-leaders to help them quickly gain credibility and popularity. Delivering the right message nowadays often includes the help of co-writers, editors, and proofreaders.
Sounds suspiciously similar to a newsroom, right?
5. Blogging Predictions
The blogging field is becoming increasingly saturated. Ever since the first success stories, everyone is lining up for a piece of the pie. Surviving in such fierce competition requires more time and effort than ever before.
But is blogging still relevant in 2026?
The answer is a resounding “Yes”!
You simply have to find the right approach to communicate with your audience.
A good idea is to focus on the so-called evergreen content, i.e. content that provides information that remains relevant and useful over the course of time.
More often than not, bloggers revisit their old work to update the information and provide a fresh take on the subject. This type of evergreen content is praised by authors as an effective way to bring recurring traffic and boost SEO.
Even though bloggers have an increasing range of analytic tools at their disposal, their writing style should favor storytelling instead of content that will appeal to search algorithms.
People must always come before machines, right?
In the next couple of years, social media will continue to heavily influence the shape and form of blogging. Millions of full-time bloggers are already using these platforms as an alternative to traditional blogs. And who can blame them?
Why not tap into this additional source of traffic and popularity if you have the chance?
Conclusion
Blogs are here to stay. There is no doubt about that. They bring us all the latest news, inspiring ideas, even contribute to our self-improvement. They are such a powerful tool that even politicians and celebrities use it to boost their visibility and ratings.
It might be hard to accurately determine how many blogs are there, but one thing’s for sure:
At this rate, we will be celebrating 1 billion blogs in no time.
Think the best is yet to come?
I sure do!
Let’s see what the future holds…
