WordPress Powers Almost 15 Percent of the Top Million Websites

WordPress has some boasting to do and for good reason. The open source content management software now powers 14.7 percent of the top one million websites in the world, according to its own data.

The percentage is growing, as 22 percent of new active domains in the US are now using WordPress. While WordPress is clearly popular right now, it is going to be used increasingly often, if the trend will continue.

"This has been an exciting year for WordPress. We’ve grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress," Automattic's Matt Mullenweg revealed.

The point of the stats is to show that the WordPress community is thriving and that open source software can be both popular and profitable for those making it and using it.

Automattic ran a survey with users and developers involved with WordPress, 18,000 of them, to get some real world info on the state of the environment.

"We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50," Mullenweg writes.

"In tough economic times, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. (If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.)," he continued.

Mullenweg also gave his annual State of the Word address covering the growth of WordPress and some of the results of the survey.

Overall, it's hard to argue with WordPress' success. By its own account, it powers over 55 million websites in the world, about half of which are hosted by WordPress.com.