This is the first in a series of monthly posts rounding up some basic stats and figures from the prior month. Because we thought that you may like to know how we’ve been doing and also get a better perspective of spam activity across the web.
This was a special month, as April 12 marked the 20‑year anniversary of commercialized spam, which is attributed to two US immigration lawyers. Happy Birthday, I guess?
Akismet caught 6,284,116,547 pieces of spam content (comments, forum posts, contact form submissions, etc.). That’s down around 6% since last month and up around 103% over April 2013. The peak of spam activity was Tuesday April 15 (the same day that Akismet 3.0 was released, coincidentally), when our service blocked over 252 million pieces of spam content. The daily breakdown goes a little something like this:
There was a bit of an interesting lull at the end of the first week, though nothing much of note to discuss. You may have certainly noticed some corresponding trends on your own site. We experienced no downtime or service interruptions throughout the month, so any dips in the chart simply manifest lower periods of general spam activity.
We missed only about 1 in every 6,904 pieces of spam content (0.0145%).
So, what does over 6 billion pieces of spam content really look like? If you assigned each piece of spam content its own seat, you could fill nearly 125,000 Yankee Stadiums.
Some reads from the month that we recommend:
+ A reluctant ‘happy birthday’ to spam
+ The rise of bad bots
+ Zombie spam!
+ Is spam the latest weapon of the US government?
+ Spam sushi is real
Akismet 