2009 was the year for WordPress.com.
It’s nothing new to hear about the tremendous popularity of WordPress.com, but the proof is in the pudding! There was a significant higher number of blogs created in 2009, more importantly was the expanding adoption rate. Who said blogs are dying?
One of the WordPress.com staff members was nice enough to share some numbers with me which I wanted to share with everyone here.
2009
- Number of blogs created – 4,351,442
- number of pageviews – 14,972,466,110
- number of comments – 104,257,295
- Number of new users – 5,231,873
- Number of files (or gb) uploaded – 46,363GB of new files
2008
- Number of blogs created – 2,906,086
- Number of pageviews – 9,402,615,494
- Number of comments – 78,773,011
- Number of new users – 3,761,296
- Number of files (or gb) uploaded – 13,500gb of new files
Growth between the years
- New blogs in 2009: 1,445,356
- Increase of pageviews: 5,569,850,616
- Increase of comments: 25,484,284
- Increase of files uploaded: 32,863gb
These are some fairly impressive numbers. Some large sites I know only push 30 million pageviews per month, but to do an impressive 14 billion pageviews overall for the year, that’s quite the feat to accomplish.
WordPress.com has some very popular competitors such as Blogger.com (Blogspot) and TypePad (MovableType), so to be able to compete and pull in this kind of traffic is an achievement to be proud of.
Below is a graph comparing WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and TypePad.com, all direct competitors.
You’ll see that Blogger.com is distinctively higher, but you must realize that Blogger.com is a Google service…and well, Google is just simply massive. Anything Google does will get a lot of buzz.
All this to say, WordPress.com had an amazing year in 2009 and they are looking forward to an even more amazing year with 2010. Hiccups happen, so don’t expect perfection.
If you were blogging on WordPress.com in 2009, what are some of the thoughts you have about your experience?
Great stats like this really help me sleep at night after making the decision to only develop for WordPres a year ago now!
Are there any guestimates as to the number of self hosted (or VIP of course) WordPress systems running currently? I would conservatively guestimate 1,000,000?
I would estimate quite a few more, probably 2 or 3 million, since there have been over 4 million downloads of WordPress 2.9 :)
I would agree with Jonathon and say at least 2 or 3 million.
Great.
It would be great to get some real stats from somewhere. I was thinking Automattic must know these vis some sort of unique domains checking for WordPress updats type log. Can you do some digging Jonathan?