What is the average size of all forums, or how would I get this information

This seems like the most related area to ask this question (forum owners are probably more likely to know the answer to this than anyone else)

I run a few forums (two vBulletin and one phpBB). However, I have no idea what the average size of a forum is (average number of pages).

Some forums reach a size of over a million pages (like this one), some only have a few thousand pages.
I'm trying to figure out how many forums there are
- To do this, I can get a very rough estimate by searching for all of the pages indexed in Google by searching for:
“powered by vBulletin”
“powered by phpBB”
I know some forums pay to take this off and I'm not looking at myBB or SMF + all the others right now.

However, this search will only give me the number of pages indexed.
If I knew the average number of (indexed) pages in a forum, I could estimate the number of forum application on the internet.

I'm currently guessing that the average number of pages is around 10-20 thousand (there are many start up forums)

Anyone have a better guess or a way to work this out?

 

And what would be the use of it?

 

check out big-boards
but it seems like a big waste of time if you really want to know the total number of forums in the world

 

Thanks for your input webcosmo...

FYI, it's for a forum project I have. I need an approximate figure for the number of forums on the internet and this is one way I thought about getting this figure.
{Sorry, the details of the project are vague to say the least, and that's intentional}

Bigboards, as the name suggest, will only give me a list of BigBoards. Averaging the size of these would give me give me the average size of big boards (not the average size of all boards). But thanks


... okay if anyone comes up with a better method that this, then let me know, otherwise I'll use the following:

From the Google search query "powerd by vBulletin" and "powerd by phpBB", I'll take the top 33 indexed forums, the last 33 indexed forums and the mid 33 indexed forums., then take the cumulative size of all of these forums, divided by 99.

[There must be a more accurate way of getting this info, but if no one can suggest one, this will have to do]

 

Well if you do the method you just posted above this post then it will not be anywhere near accurate and there's not much you can do with not even a quarter accurate data.

Good luck with your project though. If I may make one suggestion, this will only work with phpBB though, check out the downloads page and check how many downloads have been made and you'll get a decent hint off of that.