90% of all comments are Spam

Akismet is a blog service and WordPress plugin against spam (and lately, included MovableType) and most of us who are blogging and running WP 2.0 is very familiar with this and can attest to its effectiveness.

Since it was launched by Matt (of WordPress.org) in October last year, it has been a blessing to most WP bloggers out there.

In the last 8 months that Akismet has been running, it has already caught over 39,568,714 spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks while only just over 4 Million legit comments got thru.

The numbers speaks for itself — 90% of blog comments are spam (and that’s just thru Akismet). The figure was around 64% when it was beta-tested in October 2005. The gap is widening every month and I will not be surprise if this ratio closes in to 99% by end of the year.

Oh, that’s just from spam bots. How about real people trolling around blogs and posting comments just to get those unsolicited link love?

Check out Akismet’s Live Spam Zeitgeist.

And here’s a tip: If you’re running Akismet and you see spam getting thru, don’t just delete them. Tag them as spam so Akismet will learn from its mistake.