14 DAY TRIAL // The first results of the mass Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com migration are coming in and it seems quite a lot of people have made the step. Microsoft says that over 500,000 Windows Live Spaces users have made the switch. WordPress.com says that new blog registrations have more than doubled after Microsoft announced that it will be shutting down its blogging platform.
"We’ve seen an explosion in the number of sites joining WordPress.com every day," Automattic's Ryan Markel wrote. Automattic is the company behind the WordPress blogging software and the WordPress.com blog host.
"With the addition of Windows Live Spaces sites moving to WordPress.com, Windows Live users who are new to blogging coming here, and word-of-mouth from our current and very passionate users, the number of people joining WordPress.com has doubled to over 900,000 per month (up from around 400,000 per month before the migration)," he announced.
Microsoft has some numbers of its own to share. The company says that 500,000 Windows Live Spaces blogs have migrated over to WordPress.com in the two months since the option has been available.
What's more, an additional 500,000 Windows Live account holders have created a WordPress.com blog using those credentials. That's a total of 1 million new blogs for WordPress in a couple of months, a very good figure for the site. Considering all the competition it's been getting from the likes of Tumblr, not to mention Twitter and Facebook, the influx of new users is healthy.
WordPress.com and Microsoft announced earlier this fall that Windows Live Spaces users will be able to migrate their existing blogs over to Automattic's platform. Not that they had much choice in the matter since Live Spaces is shutting down in March 2011.
There were some confusions about how many people actually used Live Spaces, but it seems that there were at least 500,000 active blogs. Of course, more will migrate in the coming months.