Jan 7, 2011 18:49 GMT  ·  By

WordPress has recently updated its stats page and they show a very interesting trend, WordPress.com has been growing like never before. There are now 16 million blogs hosted by the service, up from only 10 million at the start of last year. What's even more surprising is that the growth mostly happened in the last few months.

"There are over 32 million WordPress publishers as of December 2010: 16 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 16.7 million active installations of the WordPress.org software," the stats page reads.

In February 2010, WordPress.com had just gotten its 10 millionth blog. In fact, when the worst outage in WordPress.com history hit, there were 10.2 million blogs on the site.

That's certainly an impressive figure, but the numbers kept on growing. Four months later, WordPress.com had 11.4 million blogs, more than one million people set up new blogs on the site in that period. At the same time, there were about 13.8 million WordPress installations in the wild.

By the end of September, the latest official stats indicated that there were 12 million WordPress.com blogs and a further 14 million WordPress installs, though, those numbers may not have been extremely accurate.

But then Microsoft announced that it would be closing down Live Spaces and that users had the chance to migrate over to WordPress.com. A couple of months later, 500,000 Live Spaces blogs had moved to WordPress.com. But the real win was in exposure, apparently, as a further 500,000 Windows Live users created new WordPress.com blogs.

WordPress revealed at the time that registration numbers more than doubled in those two months, averaging around 900,000 new blogs each month, versus 400,000 previously. This would mean that there were about 14 million WordPress.com blogs at the end of November.

It now looks like that rate has doubled once again and WordPress.com has added 2 million new blogs in just one month. Considering the age of the service and the fact that newer platforms, Tumblr in particular, get a lot more attention these days, it's certainly impressive.