Verisgn estimate that at least one in 50 new sites is a spam site. Given that the total number of weblogs is normally measured by those that are actually posted to, this does not account for the growing number of spam blogs.
I suspect that spam blogs actually account for an alarmingly high percentage of the total, and people like Technorati have to index them. A reputation system for blogs could effectively weed out this load.
Verisign reports that it:
“will change the way it reports the size of its domain name business, in terms of active registrations, because of the amount of speculation going on. It will reduce the size of the reported registrations by about 2%”
“Names are being bought and then tested against traffic analyzers,” Sclavos said. “The ones that can generate more than the $6 or $7 [registration] fee per year are kept, the other ones are returned within the five day grace period.”
With Google hosted blogs, there is no $6 fee, and and many spam term searches on bloglines or Technorati return hundreds of thousands of results.
Pay-per-click speculation market soaring – Computer Business Review