Welcome to the second post in a series of monthly articles summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. You can find April’s post here.
In May, Akismet caught a total of 6,562,229,410 pieces of spam – including comments, forum posts, contact form submissions, etc. To visualize this number, picture each piece of spam as a sugar cube – that’d be enough sugar cubes to fill about 6 and a fifth Olympic swimming pools.
The amount of spam we caught in May is up 4% from last month, and up 269% from May 2012. Here’s a breakdown of the spam and ham we detected each day:
There weren’t any big dips or highs during the month of May. The busiest day of the month was May 8, with just over 230 million spam messages detected. The slowest day was May 25, with ‘only’ about 178 million pieces of spam caught. You may have seen similar ups and downs in the spam activity on your own site.
We had no service interruptions this month, so any fluctuations in spam numbers we attribute to the natural way spam is posted. If you want to hear about any service interruptions you can subscribe to this blog, or follow us on Twitter.
As usual, there’s much more spam going around than real comments (which we call ham). You can see this by looking at the purple bars in the graph.
Akismet detected a total of 294,312,590 real messages in May. If each real comment were a sugar cube, they’d only enough be enough to fill about 10% of one Olympic swimming pool.
In May, we missed only about 1 in every 7,404 spam messages. If you’ve seeing lots of missed spam comments on your own site, we are happy to help with that, so feel free to contact us about it, and please include your website & your API key in your message.
Some reads from the month that we recommend:
This month, we rather enjoyed reading this piece by Adrienne LaFrance about the history of spam (going back to snail mail!), and how it affects us nowadays. We also liked Seth Godin’s sage advice (as always) on how not to spam people as a business, but still get business. In fact, in July Canada’s Anti-Spam legislation will come into effect (similar to CAN-SPAM), making the suggestions Seth Godin recommends, and even stricter rules around emailing, into law, which should make Canadians much happier with their inboxes :). We like where this is going!
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