14 DAY TRIAL // Blogs are getting really old, by Internet standards, but they've become such an integral part of Internet life that we hardly realize they're there. In fact, one of the best-known blogging platforms out there, Blogger, is turning 10 years old in a couple of months. And, just to make sure nothing will ruin the party, the data from comScore consolidates its rule as the biggest blog hosting platform, by far. The numbers for May show that 52 million people have visited a blog hosted on Blogger in the US alone.
The second biggest platform, Wordpress.com, had almost half of Blogger's traffic, with 28 million unique visitors. Six Apart sites collectively gathered 14 million visitors, coming in at number three. But while the ten-year-old platform may still be number one, with a comfortable lead, Wordpress.com is growing at a much higher rate of 40 percent compared to Blogger's 14 percent.
Worldwide, it's pretty much the same story, with Blogger in front, having 267 million people reading a blog hosted on it every month, while Wordpress.com has 143 million unique visitors. However, the two platforms are growing at a much faster rate globally, with the former at 38 percent a year and the latter at 59 percent.
Blogger was founded in 1999, when blogging platforms were just beginning to appear, and was later acquired by Google, in 2003. No doubt, the search giant is making a nice profit with the optional AdSense ads displayed by many of Blogger's users, but just yesterday it started showing ads in the post publishing page.
Blogs haven't been very hot for a while now, with social networks and, recently, Twitter stealing the limelight, but neither are they very likely to go away anytime soon. And while Twitter already has more than 17 million unique visitors in the US, it really started taking off just a couple of months ago and, in fact, the latest numbers show a big slowdown of its growth rate.