Disruptive Conversations

If you had any doubt about the outcome of the "platform wars" of the past few years for "blog"-type sites, one graphic can remove that doubt:

This comes from a just-released study from Pingdom and before you say "well, of course, this is all about blogs, so naturally WordPress would dominate"... please do scroll down the article and see the range of sites that Pingdom's study covers (the ones that are italicized use WordPress):

• Huffington Post
• Mashable
• TechCrunch
• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Ars Technica
• The Next Web
• GigaOm
• CNN Political Ticker
• ReadWriteWeb

... and many more... the point is that what is classified as a "blog" for this study includes many of the "media" sites that many of us visit frequently - and many of those "media" sites turn out to be using WordPress.

The Pingdom article has many other great pieces of information, including this chart comparing the platforms of the Technorati Top 100 blogs in 2009 versus 2012:

The outright (and not surprising) decline of some platforms like TypePad (on which this DisruptiveConversations site is still hosted) is very clear for all to see as well as the strong rise in WordPress usage.

The ecosystem around WordPress continues to expand at a phenomenal rate and studies like this are useful to measure that actual growth. What would be interesting to see, too, would be a study of "websites" in general, i.e. not just "blogs" but perhaps the Alexa Top 100 or some other set, to see what % of sites there use WordPress and these other platforms. As noted in the Pingdom article, the WordPress team has spent a great amount of time working on making the system more useful as a more generic content management system (CMS) and so the type of sites that are now using WordPress is expanding far beyond its roots in blogging. It will be interesting to see how that changes the web hosting dynamics over the next few years.

Thanks to Pingdom for undertaking the work - and I look forward to seeing what the field looks like in another three years!

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