Blog comment spam statistics: An insight

Statistics showing how much comment spam my blog has received since December 2007.

Anyone who runs a blog would be familiar with spam, those unsolicited comments and trackbacks sent by scammers to try and lure people to click on unsavoury links.

I get a lot of them submitted to my Grapevine blog, and I thought I’d examine the data produced by my spam filter software Akismet to see how many I get every month.

The following is a graph that displays the number of submitted spam comments per month since December 2007. As can be seen, the amount of comment spam has risen substantially.

The greatest amount of comment spam was submitted in July 2011 when the Grapevine received 12,409 submissions. That’s 400 submissions a day or one every four minutes.

Last month the Grapevine received 6,981 submissions.

This is a tremendous waste of bandwidth, but an unfortunate reality of running a blog in 2013. Even back in 2004, I wrote of the problems of email spam. If there were a way to stop this wasteful consumption of resources, it’d be terrific but no solution seems imminent. In the interim, we have to rely on tools like Akismet.

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