Spam is growing.
From 0 to 1,000,000: 70 days
From 1,000,000 to 100,000,000: 190 days
100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000: 257 days
1 billion to 2 billion: 108 days
It’s funny how fast that last billion went. To celebrate we made a new chart showing total spam blocked over time.
Akismet 
omg! that is insane and cool! serious thanks to the team for such an easy to use and very useful plugin to my WP powered website.
108 Days…its depressing
It’s weird how spam grows along with ham or vice versa.
I think it would be a lot more useful to see how many spam per site Akismet is catching. It’s obvious that Akismet would be catching more spam as time goes on because more sites are using it.
Very interesting data… I think the most curious thing about this graph is the sharp sudden (and sustained) increase in ham or legitimate comments in May 2007. What do you think was the cause of this increase? Was there really an increase in ham, or were you able to fine-tune the Akismet service to reduce your false positives around this time?
John, a major site started running a type of content through it that wasn’t comments, it’s 95% legit rather than the other way around, so the ham spiked because of that.
Congratulations to everyone who made this possible! 🙂
that’s so cool. 🙂 Congrats.
I guess the real question is “how long until 10 billion”? From the looks of it, that mark might even be reached by the end of the year.
Just out of curiosity, what sparked the large spike in “ham” around middle of 2007-05?
Wow! You guys really have done the community a massive service. Thank you so much for that. We all appreciate Akismet.
That graph shows some interesting features. There’s a jump of several hundred thousand spam messages in mid-May, and also some intriguing periodicity. Have you run it through a Fourier transform?
Also, I’d be curious to see what the ratio of spams caught over Akismet installations looks like as a function of time.
I concur with Nick (comment 7). The charts are hard to make nay sense of, when the growth in sites using Askimet is not also shown. clearly if Askimet is downloaded by more and more people, you will get an evermore increasing spam/ham curve.
right, i always feel secured with akismet, thanks to it 🙂
I like the idea of “ham.” Thanks for the concept!
Thanks you very much for Akismet , the plugin is very good
thanx to akismet, my blog is spam free. without akismet, it would be hard to control spam comments myself, thanx akismet!!!
If it was not for Akismet, I would have given up writing my blog months ago. I know that Steve Rubel has changed platform just so he could use Akismet. Must be nice going to work at a place like yours.
Congratulations on a great plugin and thanks again.
David