WordPress Now Powers Over 73 Million Blogs

Sites include WordPress.com . Published on April 28th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

All this talk about Tumblr killing off WordPress seems like just that—talk. Not only is WordPress still dominating the blog hosting space, it seems to increasing the rate at which it grows. The popular CMS now powers over 73 million blogs and counting, and has a 22 million blogs lead on Tumblr, its nearest competitor.

But WordPress isn’t only dominating the blogs space in terms of numbers; it’s creating waves in terms of quality too. WordPress dominates the hosting of blogs that rank in the top 100 online. To put this into perspective, WordPress ran around 32% of the top 100 blogs listed on Technorati 3 years; today that number is more than 49%.

So devastating has been the impact of WordPress’ growth that former competitor, Typepad has seen a dramatic decline in the use of its platform. 3 years ago Typepad powered 16 blogs in the top 100; today that number is a paltry 2. It’s probably a matter of time before Typepad disappears completely from the landscape or gets gobbled up by one of the ruling class.

For now the battle between Tumblr and WordPress will no doubt heat up. 51 million blogs (Tumblr’s number) is nothing to sniff at, and the pace at which they got there is also astounding. Now that people are starting to discover the power of WordPress, things should pan out nicely competition-wise.

WordPress or Tumblr? Which do you prefer? Let us know below.