We’re seeing signs of serious traction for WordPress. According to Quantcast (a website popularity tracking service), WordPress.com and it’s family of websites under the Automattic umbrella have reached 500 million unique visitors per month.
Yikes! That’s in the realm of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. But the overhead at Automattic is a fraction of the other companies with only 75 employees versus the other mega corporations numbering in the tens of thousand. Goliaths meet our David.
We can’t help trying to corollate this spike with Microsoft recently switching their personal blogging users over to WordPress in late November. If you look on the graph above, Automattic’s traffic doubled in November/December. Coincidence? Probably not.
For the infrastructure geeks, we were blown away that Microsoft would convert those blogging users over to WordPress which usually runs on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) system which is one of their biggest threats in terms of server technology.
This ranking would not include self hosted WordPress.org web sites.
See it: Quantcast
Via: Toni.org
the weird thing is; the windows live blogs were migrated to wordpress.com in september, so one would expect to see a surge as early as october?
the other weird thing: somewhere in november the official wordpress.com stats plugin for self-hosted blogs started including calls to quantserve (which I’m not to happy with, actually).
and if you read the original article: “the bump you see in November is when we started tracking […] WordPress.com Stats users in addition to WordPress.com visitors”
so indeed, self-hosted wordpress blogs that have wordpress.com stats plugin are included.
hi Frank, thanks for pointing out that self hosted sites who are using wp.com stats are now counted.
I think I know how you feel about Quantcast… they tend to slow down sites in general.