January has been a slow and steady month in Akismet-land. Whereas in months prior, we’ve broken daily spam records, in January the spammers took it easy and we never saw a day with over 300 million spam comments caught.
The total number of spam comments caught in January was a mere 6,586,661,000 – compare that to the over 10 billion comments in December, that’s a drop of 35%. We did have more comments this month than the same time last year – 5% more.
Let’s put this number in perspective. The latest figures for the world population were published in 2013 by the world bank, and the number was just over 7 billion.
If we wrote down each spam comment caught this month on a piece of paper, and handed out each of these notes to one person in the world, we’d have enough people on earth to hold all of the papers. In fact, we’d have some people left over that didn’t need to hold a piece of paper.
In contrast there were only 157,555,500 legitimate comments that came through this month. Legitimate comments account for about 2% of all the content Akismet sees come through.
If we wrote down each legitimate comment we got this month on a piece of paper and gave each to one person, we’d need just 2% of the world population in order to hold them all.
As for Akismet’s uptime: there were no service interruptions this month. You can find information about any performance issues on this blog, via Twitter, and on this status page.
You may have also seen a drop in spam comments this month on your own blog. If you are having any issues with spam or with Akismet, please feel free to contact us, we’re happy to help :mrgreen:.
This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.
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