A new Pingdom study has concluded that half of the top 100 blogging sites are now powered by WordPress.

WordPress, the free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system based on PHP and MySQL has long been one of the most popular platforms for personal and professional blog sites (that’s what we use here at Talesofinterest.net as well).

After observing the top 100 blogging platforms in Technorati’s index, a leading blog search engine and directory, a new research study released by the website uptime monitoring company Pingdom discovered that 49 percent of the top 100 blogs now use WordPress.

That includes both its hosted sand self-hosted forms, and is up from the32 percent recorded in a study conducted back in 2009. No other blogging platform even came close.

Typepad, a blogging service from the company SAY Media originally released in the fall of 2003, was still the second most widely used platform in 2009, but now it has, for all practical purposes, disappeared from the rankings.

Movable Type, a web publishing system developed by the company Six Apart, was still being used by 12 of the top 100 blogs back in 2009, but now is down to 7.

Confidentiality and Custom Platforms

Apart from the total WordPress dominance on the blogging platform plane, what was most intriguing about this study was the steady increase of blogging platforms that allow customization.

In the Technorati Index top 10, for of the blogging sites now use their own form of custom blogging platform. This is a perfect example of how competitive and diversified the professional blogging market has now become.

After all, the majority of blog sites look very much alike and having a platform you can customize to fit a company’s needs lets these websites to distinguish themselves from the competition.

As a result, this opened the door to a whole new level of secrecy within blogging sites. Pingdom, for example, was unable to determine which platforms some of the top 100 sites use and was even told by one site administrator that they “were under non-disclosure agreement to not reveal anything about the site.”

Platform

2009

2012

Blogger

3

2

Blogsmith

14

4

Bricolage

1

0

Custom

8

14

Diderot

0

1

Drupal

4

6

Expression Engine

1

0

Movable Type

12

7

Gawker

8

5

N/a

0

8

Scoop

1

1

Tumblr

0

1

Typepad

16

2

WordPress – hosted

5

9

WordPress -self hosted

27

40

© 2011 Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha
WordPress SEO fine-tune by Meta SEO Pack from Poradnik Webmastera