Which is bigger? Forums or blogs?

[Nuke]

While bloggers certainly have more media attention, forums are the rival group with a most likely comparable amount of people. While forum owners are most certainly a smaller group than blog owners, the blogger community is all owners.

Tumblr has (almost) 50 million blogs. WordPress has about 70 million blogs. Based on this, I find it safe to assume that the bloggers are at least 130 million people.

Forums, on the other hand, are so much more decentralized that it is extremely difficult to make an estimate.

 

[etc]

it may be true but these bloggers are somehow forum members 😀

 

[XcapeX]

Blogs are much bigger and more popular than forums.

 

[Nuke]

it may be true but these bloggers are somehow forum members 😀

Of course one can be part of both groups. But yeah, Volux, forums are pretty huge. Just look at Anonymous. Their people may be withdrawing from the forum community now, but since imageboards are still message boards, they're actually forum people.

So I'd say forums probably have over 100M people, too, especially considering Gaia has like 20M people and 4chan has probably 5-15M and they're the biggest.

 

[froggyboy604]

I think there are more blog owners, but there are more forum members since there is more of sense of community in a forum compared to a blog, and anyone who joins a forum can post topics, and not just replies like blogs.

Forums generally have more replies, and comments on topics compared to blogs in my experience except for giant blogs which get a lot of traffic.

 

[Nuke]

Yeah, definitely more blog owners than forum owners. But the question is if they outnumber forum members, so it gets a little tricky.

 

[froggyboy604]

A lot of blog owners also use forums to promote their blog since blog commenting takes a lot of time, and does not always work at getting traffic if the blog you are commenting on have few readers compared to forum posting on active forums where you just post a topic about your blog and post topics and replies in a promotion forum which can get you 100s or more visitors per month to your blog depending on how active the forum you are posting on is, and how popular your topics and replies are, and how many topics and replies you made on a forum.

I think most successful blog owners will eventually think about also being forum owners if their blog becomes very popular, and have a lot of readers, they might as well start a forum for blog members to post on their forum when there are no new posts on the blog to read.

warriorforum.com and forums.digitalpoint.com also have a large percentage of bloggers as their memberbase.

 

[Pebbles]

lm guessing blogs are more popular these days
too bad though​

 

[Myhostv]

It depends on what forum/blog you are referring to

 

[Pvcomputers]

Forums by a long shot.

 

[Venom]

Gonna Have to agree with Pv. Forums are better.

 

[Myhostv]

Forums

 

[Nuke]

At this point, bloggers number probably over 200M, so it's really safe to assume that forums are less popular, considering I sometimes find it difficult to even find people who know the meaning of "forum" -- It's usually believed to be a type of blog.

 

[VirusZero]

When dealing with guesses/estimates, it's a good idea to be a bit cautious and not trust the numbers too much since there are a lot of variables to consider...
Things like:
- How many people have multiple blogs/sites?
- How many people transferred from one to another? (Maybe started n Tumblr then moved to Wordpress.)
- How many are actually active/in use or have at some point been active? (I mean there are plenty of people who register a blog then do nothing with it. Maybe just camp on a particular url since they think it may be popular. Or intend to do something but then don't.)
- How much bleedover is there? (I mean I own both a forum and I have an account on Tumblr for promotion of my forum... And how many are like me?)

That stated, it's difficult to know exactly how many forums or blogs there are since there are free hosted options for both (which are easier to know numbers since they often post milestones). But how many paid-host options are there? (People who own hosting and run a blog or forum? Or both?) Since it's very difficult to accurately measure all of them. (Which could easily inflate forum or blog numbers to a higher level.)

Though I think we should also be somewhat careful since 1 Blog/blogger doesn't necessarily equal 1 forum/forum admin. (There is some crossover to be certain in that both have to promote their site/blog.)
But one forum is very often larger than a single blog might ever get. I mean a good sized forum might have well over 10,000 posts. And may grow at a rate of 30-70 posts a day. And there aren't many bloggers that can really compete with that sort of numbers per day (at least not for very long anyway.)
So in that regard, a forum is more like the blog site's owner (like Tumblr or Wordpress rather) than a blogger. And each member of a forum is more like a blogger. And that kind of changes the numbers a bit.

For interest sake, InvisionFree reports they have over 2.7 million forums with 40 million users, meanwhile Zetaboards reports 3.8 million users on 120,000 forums. (Though those numbers haven't been updated in at least 2 years. So it's fairly safe to assume that they've since gone up.)
Though, like mentioned above with Blogs, some caution should be taken here since we don't know if they're reporting individual and unique users or every account that gets registered. (Which is important because some people register on multiple sites...)
But if we go with the number of registered users for forums rather than number of forums, I think things will even out a bit more. (Or possibly even tip the numbers in favour of forums... )

 

[Teg]

Blogs are more popular than forums for sure, however, look at blogs and determine the amount of members for one blog. Now, look at a forums, determine the amount of members for one forum. What do you see?

 

[Jason07]

blogs

 

[froggyboy604]

A lot of bigger blogs like theverge.com now has a forum at theverge.com/forums .

I think in the future, more blog owners would have forums with their blog, and forum owners would have blogs for their forum since both forums, and blogs serve different purposes.

A forum is for all members to post topics and replies while a blog is for bloggers to post articles for people to reply to if they choose to allow comments. Blogs are also usually themed around current events in a certain topic like sports while a forum is for asking questions, socializing, and debating a topic.

 

[Claus32]

I think more people visit forums

 

[Nuke]

A lot of bigger blogs like theverge.com now has a forum at theverge.com/forums .

I think in the future, more blog owners would have forums with their blog, and forum owners would have blogs for their forum since both forums, and blogs serve different purposes.

A forum is for all members to post topics and replies while a blog is for bloggers to post articles for people to reply to if they choose to allow comments. Blogs are also usually themed around current events in a certain topic like sports while a forum is for asking questions, socializing, and debating a topic.

This has gone in a rather unfortunate direction.

Today, we now seemingly have a massive anti-commenting movement among bloggers, driven by hysteria over trolls. Debate has become more and more overwhelmed by "I'm entitled to my opinion." and as such blogs have gained more stature.

There are two hundred and sixty five million blogs on tumblr. Facebook and Twitter are also blogs of different sorts. WordPress et al get much more discussion than phpBB. Finding members who know how to use forums has become a serious problem when trying to find members for me. I believe that forums are in a tough spot right now.

 

[CM30]

Well, that's a bit of a vague question. There are easily many millions of each, so it's pretty hard to make a comparison (especially when you move into self hosted sites, like the majority of the internet).