We know from Technorati that there are about 50 million blogs on the web and the numbers continue to grow to about 175,000 blogs a day. That’s amazing, but what I want to know is the number of forums on the internet? Could there be just as many forums as there are Blogs? I’m putting an article together and trying to find out the number of user forums? And how many are being created daily (growth rate)? If anyone has any hard facts or even guesses please post them.
Interesting stats. I don't think that the forums will be anywhere near the 20 millions mark (including the freely hosted ones). IMO social networking forums are struggling today due to the presence of orkut/myspace/hi5. As per Google: Results 1 - 10 of about 70,600,000 for "powered by phpbb". Results 1 - 10 of about 55,300,000 for "powered by vbulletin". Of course these are not sites but pages. Then again, I've seen a lot of new webmasters who are more interested to launch their first website backed by a free forum software than a geocities page.
Endurer, thanks for those stats but it's more of indexed pages and not how many user forums. Let's look at this another way: Is there a number of how many installed forums on the net for: vBulletin, SMF, IPB, phpBB and all the others?