In March, Akismet saw 5,426,166,500 spam comments go through. Though this was a rise of 32% since last month, it’s a decrease from last year’s March by 19 percent. It’s been a quiet March.

If we wanted to visualize this number, we could write down each spam comment on a piece of paper and ask each person in the USA to hold on to them. In that case, each person would be holding onto 17 pieces of paper to cover all of the spam we received.
As usual, Akismet saw much less ham go around this month – only about 2.7% of all comments were real comments. We’d need only half of the people in the United States to hold just one piece of paper to cover all the ham comments – there were 147,994,500 total ham comments going through.
Here’s a chart breaking down the numbers per day:

If you’re having any trouble with spam comments getting through on your site, or any false positives in your spam folder, feel free to contact us so we can help :).
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.