One, if not the most, popular blog niche is food blogs. It stands as one of the highest-paying niche medians for blogging.1 The amount of time, resources, and energy to start a food blog is minimal and the awards can be fantastic in a short matter of time.2
Yet, a number that seems to be quite elusivily pervasive in the industry is, how many food blogs exist on the internet. At the end of the day, no one is individually capable of calculating the exact number. This leads me to quite the perplexion as after Google searching the industry size you see many people purport numbers which are surely exaggerated, such as this absurd number;
"There are almost over 600 million food blogs online today"-
Profile Tree
Unfortunately, I see many people quoting this number in other posts without taking a quick second to calculate that it would mean about one out of a dozen people own a food blog. I believe that this number somehow managed to get to the top of the SEO ranking list, despite it being a misquoted capture of the blogging industry as a whole.3 There is a slight chance that this number is true due to the multiplicity of duplicated food blogs, alongside copycats,4 but I find this number even with copy-cats and replicas to be true. Especially after analysis.
Here is a breakdown of some data that I was able to curate for the sake of this post;
As you can see from the numbers listed above, all are derived from WordPress Plugin Marketplace, in total, we are looking at under 100,000 active food blogs using the plugins above. I believe these numbers above are the most accurate to anchor a total market size as most WordPress themes require a way to format a recipe to present to viewers. There are as mentioned, many themes5 that are capable of having recipes written on them, although the ease and access of using a proper recipe template plugin enhances the opportunity for monetization alongside the ease of creating posts.
Analyzing WordPress we can see that the number of food blogs isn't in the hundreds of millions, but rather the hundreds of thousands. With all that said it is important to recognize the following statistics;
So, once again it is quite easy to evaluate that there are NOT 600 million food blogs, but rather just 600 million blogs in general. Overall I believe the safe assumption is to guess that at the current moment, food blogs are hovering around the seven-digit number.
At the start of 2024, we can safely assume that the market size of the food blogging industry, in terms of blogs online, is more than a couple hundred thousand. Professionally, this number is most likely a lot smaller. Alongside this statistic of what I purport to be a fairly plausible assumption, it must be said that the number of overall food influencers, which include both food bloggers and food social media influencers, is most likely much higher.
