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.

February was another slow spam month for Akismet. We didn’t even hit 200 million comments on any day this month. You can see the daily breakdown of the spam and ham comments Akismet caught in the graph below:

The total number of spam messages caught this month was 4,090,182,500. To visualize this, let’s say each spam is represented by one blade of grass in a football field — to commemorate the football season ending this February.

How many football fields would it take to cover that much spam? Twelve and a half.

How about the real comments? We got a total of 131,465,000 of those this month. And if each one were represented by a blade of grass, they would take just under one half of a football field to account for. As always, real comments account for much much less than spam comments — about 3% this month.

This month was unusually low in spam numbers not only compared with last month (with a 14% decrease in volume), but also since last year — decreasing by 38% compared with February 2014.

We missed only about 1 in every 10,917 spam comments this month — not bad!

Your own blog’s stats may have followed a similar pattern of decreased spam activity this month. If you are ever finding that the spammers are winning and more comments than usual are getting through Akismet’s filters, please feel free to reach out and let us know. We’re happy to look into it and help restore order :)

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.

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.

Gone with the Wind is the highest-grossing movie of all time – making over 3 billion dollars¹. The next highest-grossing film is Avatar, with just over 2.7 billion dollars to its name.

 

In December, Akismet caught 10,136,855,000 spam comments – that’s just over 10 billion. If each spam comment were one dollar, that amount would be about equal to 3 times the total sales of Gone with the Wind. Not too shabby.

On the other hand, Akismet saw just 156,497,000 real comments go through in December. If each one of those were one dollar, they’d make up about 4% of the total sales of Gone with the Wind. As is usual, we see much less real comments than spam comments – at a ratio of about 1 to 65 this month.

Here’s the day-to-day breakdown:

 

For the first time since June, Akismet saw a drop in the number of spam comments month-to-month – we dropped 16% compared to November. However, we still saw a rise of 52% since last year in December.

Now… what about 2014 as a whole? Here’s what that looked like in plot form:

 

How do the numbers fare against the highest grossing movies of all time? In January 2014, Akismet saw about 6 billion comments go through in total. If each comment were one dollar, that’s like the total sales of Gone with the Wind and Avatar combined.

Things were moving along at about the same rate until August, when we started noticing much more spam coming through. In September we hit the 300 million spam caught per day mark. In total, there were 8 billion comments caught.

November was our highest-traffic month with over 12 billion spam comments caught. Continuing with our movie example, that would be like adding up the totals for the top 4 highest grossing films and then a little more: Gone with the Wind and Avatar and Star Wars and Titanic.

What about the total amount of spam for 2014? That’s 90,326,951,500 – like adding up the total sales of the top 10 movies… and quadrupling that number.

Over the year, you may have seen similar trends in the amount of spam comments that you see come through on your own blog or website. As always, if you’re having any issues please do contact us, we’re happy to help!

We’re looking forward to an even more fruitful 2015, with Akismet continuing to save you from your spam. All of us from Akismet wish you a thrilling, successful, and happy new year!

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.

Footnote
¹when adjusted for inflation in 2011 dollars, which is what really counts ;)