WordPress.com, a free, hosted blog service, turns eight months old this month. CEO Toni Schneider shared some of the current stats of the service with me over the weekend at a conference they held in San Francisco.
The top blog (by traffic) on WordPress.com is written by Robert Scoble (who was, incidentally, just interviewed by the San Jose Mercury News). But there are 300,000 other blogs hosted on the service as well, generating about 1.6 million daily page views and 14.2 million unique monthly visitors. These numbers have doubled since May, when they had just 800,000 daily page views and 7.3 million uniques. 40% of traffic to the site is non-U.S.
While not statistically relevant, the page view numbers on Alexa and the hype trends on Google Trends show very positive growth as well. Bottom line, WordPress is seeing tremendous growth. In our opinion this is well deserved – all Crunch Network blogs run on wordpress software, and we called it one of the companies we couldn’t live without at the end of 2005. More importantly, another product they’ve developed, a spam filter for blogs called Akismet, has saved me from dealing with nearly 120,000 spam comments over the last few months.
WordPress is headquartered in San Francisco, has eight employees and says they just turning profitable through premium services and revenue from Akismet.