14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress seems to have had a lot of reasons to celebrate these last few days. Just before it released WordPress 3.2, the previous version, WordPress 3.1, reached 15 million downloads. Now it reached another milestone, WordPress software powers 50 million blogs on WordPress.com and on independent hosts.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the popular open source blogging software, runs a counter displaying various stats among which is the number of WordPress blogs.
Until recently, it displayed the total number of blogs on WordPress.com, the blog hosting service. Also until recently, there were less than 20 million blogs hosted by the site.
But WordPress switched to a new counter which includes data from self-hosted blogs as well, indicating that there are now 50 million blogs running on WordPress in the world.
The company says that about half of those are on WordPress.com, the rest being users who set up their own shops around the web.
With most people switching to more casual ways of sharing and engaging with their friends, Facebook, Twitter and the likes, blogging isn't as glamorous as it was in its hay day.
Yet, despite the bigger commitment, more and more people pick up blogging each day, as evident from the huge growth WordPress.com and the WordPress ecosystem in general have seen in the past year in particular.
WordPress.com only hosted its 10 millionth blog in February last year. Since then, the service has added 15 million more. The site hosted 16 million blogs at the end of 2010 and there were about 17 million other blogs powered by WordPress on the web at the time.
WordPress got 20 million more publishers in half a year, a huge growth by any standard. And there doesn't seem to be a slowdown in growth, at this rate WordPress should have twice as many users at the end of 2011 as it did at the end of 2010.