14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress is on a roll lately. It is adding new users like never before, four million blogs were created on WordPress.com in the last three months alone. The self-hosted version isn't doing that bad either, WordPress 3.0 has now been downloaded over 30 million times.
The current stable release of the very popular open-source blogging software is seven months old today, so it took just over half a year for it to reach this number.
WordPress 3.0 hit 20 million downloads a couple of months ago, the download rate seems to be accelerating. However, it's unlikely that it will reach much more than that since WordPress 3.1 should be landing any day now.
WordPress has been around for quite a few years. Recently, most people have been moving away from blogging towards social networking or tools like Twitter.
At the same time, a number of simpler blogging platforms, like Tumblr or Posterous, have become quite popular in their own right.
It should be expected then that WordPress, both the WordPress.com hosting service as well as the open-source software, would be slowing down or, at the very least, stagnating.
That's hardly the case, 2010 was WordPress' best year to date, by a huge margin. WordPress.com went from 10 million blogs in early 2010 to 16 million at the end of the year.
At the start of 2010 there were even more self-hosted blogs using WordPress in the wild. And that figure grew as well, reaching 16.7 million blogs in December, the most recent official figure.
But the download counter shows that the software has been grabbed over 30 million times. Of course, that is not to say that 30 million people have downloaded WordPress, many have downloaded it more than once.
It also doesn't mean that there are 30 million WordPress blogs out there, or even close to that. But it does show that, if anything, WordPress is now more popular than ever. [via TNW]