14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress has been around for ages now, but it has really started to soar last year. Millions of blogs were created, it grew by more than 60 percent in 2010. And it keeps on adding new blogs, it's now getting close to 20 million.
By themselves, the numbers are certainly impressive, were it not for Tumblr's truly astounding numbers, the burgeoning blogging platform is actually catching up to WordPress and is just 1.5 million blogs away from overtaking it, like Pingdom noticed.
WordPress' latest stats show that the blogging platform is very close to breaking past the 20 million blogs milestone. WordPress' stat page reports 19.876 million blogs so it's literally days away from reaching the milestone.
That's 20 million blogs hosted by WordPress.com, there are millions more bloggers using the WordPress software platform.
WordPress.com started the year with about 16 million blogs, so it added 4 million more in the first four months of the year. That's a solid growth rate and the most interesting part is that it's sustained for the past few months.
WordPress benefited from an influx of new blogs as users transitioned from the Windows Live Spaces platform which was closing down. From September till the end of 2010, WordPress.com added some 4 million blogs.
All in all, WordPress.com is experiencing its strongest period of growth. Which is why Tumblr's growth is even more impressive. The blogging platform reports that there are 18.416 million blogs hosted by Tumblr.com.
In the last day alone, 28 million posts were published on Tumblr. In the same time, only 390,000 posts were published on WordPress.com.
Of course, there are some big differences between the two platforms, WordPress.com is a full-blow and very capable publishing platform, while Tumblr focuses on simplicity and re-blogging.
So the amount of original content hitting Tumblr is bound to be significantly smaller than what the stats indicate, but it still shows that the site enjoys a highly engaged community.