I am currently typing in one of the popular and widely-used publishing tools on the internet today: WordPress. In sea of content more and more dominated by short-form tools like Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr, the open sourced platform has seen a healthy growth in the last year.
“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,” said Matt Mullenweg, the original developer of WordPress, in a blog post.
Also, in a talk posted in the same entry, Mullenweg noted that WordPress has over 15,000 plugins and has seen 200 million plugin downloads. In the fastest upgrade in the platform’s history, WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days.
They also posted a map (above) of where people are using WordPress.
A recent survey also found that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. Mullenweg suggested the casual math that if each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate. With a free platform to work off, WordPress is certainly allowing people to leverage real business opportunities in a tough economy.
They published the full survey results here. Have at it, data buffs, and let us know if you come up with any other interesting findings.
