Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic’s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) sure show it. Here are the stats for WordPress.com over the last year:
- Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
- 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
- 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
- Two million new blogs created for the year
- 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)
This growth is also seems significant versus WordPress.com’s main competitor, Typepad. Comscore numbers put US numbers at 20.9M uniques for WordPress.com against 7.2M on Typepad.com, and internationally 97.8M vs. 16.8M. Here’s the Compete graph (which only measures US traffic):
And for WordPress.org (the self-hosted, open-source version), Mullenweg announced today that there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs in the wild. This figure is based on real data (not sampling), similar to Mozilla accumulating browser stats. Downloads from WordPress.org went over 11 million since last summer (up from 2.8 million the year before), thanks to over 11 new WP releases.
The focus for 2009? Easier upgrades. Their growth, Mullenweg says, is not dissimilar from other popular products (he mentioned Microsoft, OSX, iPhone, Facebook platform as examples), and believes that good platforms need good self-updating systems. Automattic has a three-prong strategy for better updates: better community awareness, working with webhosts, and adding automatic upgrades functionality to WordPress. Mullenweg envisions the upgrade process to work just like Firefox: one-click, with a list of plugin and theme incompatibilities generated. WordPress.org’s plugin directory (and a recently-launched theme directory) will help make this possible. Many new features are also in the pipeline, including the much anticipated BuddyPress, but that a clean update system will remove one of the biggest thorns for WP users.
Also up for 2009 is better security. Their most recent release, 2.6.1, was an optional update (no security patches), which is a nice departure from their previous, critical ‘dot’ releases. WordPress has received a lot of flack for this recently: they were given a 2008 Pwnie for Mass 0wnage for numerous vulnerabilities that led to mass hacking.
wordpress rocks
blogger, typepad sucks
Wordpress has always rocked because of instant support in their forums, support from huge number of wordpress users when compared to other paid services like typepad or free services like blogger which may go down any moment and your blogs get deleted any time. Wordpress is one of the most secure CMS.
wordpress does rock. I am not a fan of typead but blogger serves its purpose.
drupal and joomla are the main competitor,but i like wordpress more
I have no trouble believing this. People are clubbing each other to make the best plugins for WP. Their workforce is largely free. I’m not sure how they make money though.
I’m one of the lead developers of WordPress, so I can answer. I have a full time job at b5media, a blog network powered by WordPress. Many WordPress developers work at Automattic running Akismet and WordPress.com etc. There are many other companies that use WordPress and hire people who have WordPress skills. So that’s one way. I also do WordPress consulting. There’s a huge market for this (2.6 million individual WordPress installs!), and that is how most people make money from WordPress.
Basically, we create a market, and benefit from offering support and development service to people using the software. WordPress will always be free, and won’t ever directly make money… it’s all about the market that it creates for supporting services.
The top 10+1 WP active plugins:
12. Hello Dolly
10. cforms
9. Polls
8. WP Automatic Upgrade
7. wp-cache
6. wp-db-backup
5. wp-stats
4. nextgen-gallery
3. google sitemap-generator
2. all-in-one seo pack
1. akismet
you guys dont use customs made plugins
yes i add one
dd sitemap generator, this is also a good one
Couple more gem stats from the keynote:
Average # active plugins per blog: 4.96
WP Plugin super user: over 1260 wordpress plugins installed (over 1000 active)
WordPress is in serious need of a rewrite. The code is shite.
It’s open source – get cracking!
Seems the code’s good enough to serve hundreds of millions of pageviews, though.
What does Mozilla data project have anything to do with this? You have no idea what you are talking about.
Allen,
Did you actually read the post?
They’re using the upgrade process in Mozilla to compare how they feel the upgrade process on wordpress should be.
Matt made reference to the Mozilla project in the speech when talking about ‘WordPress Zeitgeist’ — how they were going to release, like Mozilla, _real_ stats usage from their respective platforms. More than just sampling, the data compiled by firefox and wordpress, respectively, is important data for both browsing patterns and blogging patterns, respectively. So that’s why he (and thus I) mention it.
“working with webhosts” amuses me.
To date Mullenweg and Co have completely ignored non-US hosting companies and will not list them on their site. Yet they have the gall to run adwords campaigns globally pushing traffic to a page listing “chosen” hosts.
Until such time as Mullenweg grows up I honestly don’t see how they are gong to be able to “work with hosts”.
Is that why 6apart was so vocal this week? Had to announce something I guess. I had no idea.
I’m set to earn over $200,000 this year from passive sales of commercial WordPress plugins alone. The user base has grown so huge…
That’s some serious bank. Props.
Considering that you referenced numbers from Compete to compare WordPress.com unique visitors to those at TypePad, how do you explain the ~100m difference between the number Automattic provided today at WordCamp and what both Compete provides? Using international data, at least Comscore seems to be closer to the number from Automattic.
Not hating, just wondering why TechCrunch is referencing a graph which seems to be so clearly wrong?
And why are you all so heavily positioning right now? Seems you all are more concerned with automattic, than with your user base. To be so fixated on the rat race to add features, you will miss opportunities to fill needs yet uncovered.
Sorry David, should have mentioned that Compete only records US traffic. It’s pretty consistent with Comscore, and Automattic didn’t say anything about US-only traffic during the speech.
We don’t track uniques internally, so I rely on a third-party to get that info, Quantcast. Fortunately both Typepad and WordPress.com use Quantcast pixels, so you really can do an apples to apples comparison:
Typepad: http://www.quan...p-fcYWUmj5YbYKM
WordPress.com: http://www.quan...p-18-mFEk4J448M
100-120 million uniques over the year, the graph shows 10-20 million a month, that seems to be spot on. It’s a huge untapped market for developers.
@David Recordon, third party metrics companies are notoriously inaccurate, but there are many reasonable explanations for the discrepancy between Compete’s Wordpress.com data and that reported by Automattic. For example, Compete only tracks sites hosted by Wordpress on the Wordpress.com domain. Many hosted blogs, including the high volume “VIPs”, use a custom domain name (ex. blogs.cnn.com), which wouldn’t be counted by Compete.
It’s amazing to see it grow so much in one year. The new designs for the admin panel look beautiful too. Great post.
My only request: make the ’save’ and ‘publish’ buttons further apart. One slip of the mouse on TC and I wouldn’t hear the end of it.
That is absolutely something we’re looking to fix for WordPress 2.7! Also of interest is making it much more clear what happens when you hit a button, especially when dealing with future-dated posts. You’re certainly not the only one to bring up that issue.
I am still not sure of the revenue model for their self-hosted service in Wordpress.com, the one where you get to use your own domain name instead of someting like myblogname.wordpress.com, you get myblogname.com.
They do charge fees for the hosting, but that is so low. They have some kind of deal with Wild West Domains (GoDaddy’s reseller plan). But does all this actually generate revenue, or are they waiting it out for the rapid growth phase and then think about revenue streams?
I was discussing this with a few people today at the event and they all seemed to think the model was genius. The up-sell model — $15/year for customizing CSS, $10/year for your own domain — seems to scale well with a lot of people who want to blog and really all they need are these two features (which cost near-zilch for WP). I’m sure the VIP treatment goes well for them as well (with so many bigco’s [still] finally jumping in on the blogging train).
I think its better to keep it cheap to encourage people to take it up. Having it expensive and fewer users does not make sense to me.
How they generate revenue? Simple: Just run Google Ads on wordpress.com blogs, without letting the users know.
And they also recommend hosting sites with affiliate links, which will net them a nice amount of money if those users want to have their own host.
Wow – 2 million+ distribution.. it’s OPEN SOURCE. I can make anything open source and get it to millions of people. Let’s see them do those numbers with commercial software.
The Wordpress code is garbage. No MVC model, the plugins API sucks and the themes are crap. Wordpress is fine for n00bs but those serious about content management don’t use Wordpress. End of story.
Wordpress could gain championship!
The figures from Google Trends for Website sounds stunning as well, the growth of WordPress is sky rocketing!
WordPress.com vs Typepad.com at Google Trends – http://trends.g...=all&sort=0
fanboys are everywhere… mac vs pc, wordpress vs typepad, canon vs nikon…. couldn’t agree more with matt the founder, security and stability should be the primary issue now…
Interesting that when you look at popularity of those blog sites based on backlinks you’d see that in Top 200 domains they have these positions:
#14: wordpress.org (868,641 referring domains pointing to them)
#32: wordpress.com (459,069)
#40: typepad.com (387,429)
So typepad is way behind in this measure – funny that is actually seems to correlate well with compete.com information.
But lets put this into real perspective:
#3 blogspot.com (1,638,430 referring domains)
Not suprising which one of those blogs was bought by Google.
Source: http://www.maje...y-backlinks.php
What always amazes me about WordPress (.com), is its ability to get a post of mine on Google superfast — and usually on page one.
I wonder how good TypePad is at that sort of thing?
I was there and it was great! Look forward to seeing crazyhorse come to reality! Shout out to Liz who I was hoping to see at the pub but ended up sleeping in (what a waste!). See p’d off about that.
Amazing but expected growth!
Blogging growth is amazing like all social media sites. FaceBook grew 1055% in Latin America in just one year.
We all know that WordPress is one of the most complete platform for blogging, thats why I use WordPress.
WordPress is in serious need of a rewrite. The code is shite..
It may not be a masterpiece of code poetry, but WordPress isn’t that dirty. The code is pretty straightforward throughout.
Not surprising, Wordpress has the best community for blogging software that I know off, well done.
i need some paid moderaters for http://www.apnadikhan.com . Can anyone helpme with that? where would i be able to get them>
thanks.
WordPress is in serious need of a rewrite. The code is best..
why http://www.usainfocatalog.us is a best web site ?
Wordpress can be extremely rewarding for bloggers if optimized well with great content and useful seo techniques.
i find it hard to believe that blogspot is in the #3 spot.
I’m loving it, really good work you’ve done here. I just wanted to say thanks for sharing directory.
A really good posting.
thanks for thats, how are you doing for this xmas? i took your reccomendation and purchased a
proximate for my wife
http://mydealli...istmas_presents
I started out blogging using blogger blogs and recently switched over to WP. I must say that the incredible array of available themes and plugins makes it really a pleasure to work with. I can’t thank the amazing programmers who create these fabulous plug-ins enough.
Great article by the way.
There are a lot of discusion about wordpress this day. I see here another one.Thanks to all:)
I’m another former blogger blogs blogger who has switched to WP. One of my problems was having the blogger people deleting a blog because they did not see it as legit. I once did a boxing blog with nothing but my own comments and it was deleted after they locked it, reconsidered and then decided it was still bad after all! Lost hundreds of posts.
i’m lover of wordpress
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Good, I have added to my favorites,
this title:The State of WordPress 2008: Awesome Growth
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Wordpress is by far the best system you can use if you have a “regular” website. With the free version available there is no reason not to use it unless you have a very specialized website.
That’s some SERIOUSLY great information you got there, thanks for sharing.
I must say that Wordpress is the best. I love open source stuff. As a novice at HTML I still love it. I am slowly learning html because of it.
I would be nice to see it a little more user friendly. Oh and make it faster.
hi blogger…
Great! it look pretty clever and sweet, i love it so much… thanks
cheers,
make money on internet
Great info. Thanks for the post. Quick question, do you think Typepad is going to surpass Wordpress as far as SEO friendliness? If Typepad gets better results then I am all for that.
No doubt, wordpress is really awesome. I like its features and interface.
Cheers,
Preeti
I believe that this is just the beginning for this type of technology.
The future id exciting indeed!
If anything I think Blogger would be the one to pass wordpress for SEO friendliness considering Google owns them. Its all in the strength of the owner though.
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Thanks
good article.
I think its great that wordpress has grown by such leaps and bounds but to be honest Im really not a huge fan of 2.7. Hopefully they work it back to the older style.
I like it
why i can’ t post my text, i mean i like this