The State of WordPress 2008: Awesome Growth

Wordcamp 2008

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 8:44 am

In the quiet flats of University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus, bloggers, thinkers, journalists, developers, and inventors melt together for a full day of lectures and learning. The goal of Wordcamp 2008 is to figure out the future of publishing on the web.

Schedule for the user track

• 9:00 a.m. The Future of Education and Wordpress -
• 9:30 a.m. SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
• 10:00 a.m. Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
• 10:50 a.m. Andy Skelton - A musical performance
• 11:00 a.m. LOLcats and the Secret of Virality
• 11:30 a.m. Wordpress & Microformats
• 12:00 p.m. Lunch
• 1:00 p.m. Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
• 1:20 p.m. 450 Wordpress Power User Tips - Lorelle VanFossen
• 1:40 p.m. Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
• 2:00 p.m. State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
• 3:00 p.m. Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
• 3:20 p.m. Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
• 3:40 p.m. An interview with Om Malik
• 4:00 p.m. Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
• 5:00 p.m. A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
• 5:10 p.m. Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra

The State of WordPress 2008: Awesome Growth

Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic’s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) sure show it. Here are the stats for WordPress.com over the last year:

• Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• Two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

This growth is also seems significant versus WordPress.com’s main competitor, Typepad. Comscore numbers put US numbers at 20.9M uniques for WordPress.com against 7.2M on Typepad.com, and internationally 97.8M vs. 16.8M. Here’s the Compete graph (which only measures US traffic):

And for WordPress.org (the self-hosted, open-source version), Mullenweg announced today that there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs in the wild. This figure is based on real data (not sampling), similar to Mozilla accumulating browser stats. Downloads from WordPress.org went over 11 million since last summer (up from 2.8 million the year before), thanks to over 11 new WP releases...