Fact Or Fiction?: WordPress Powers 8.5% Of The Internet UPDATE: Stat Originally From Drupal Slideshow
Note: See update below! (original stat tracked down)
I first came across this “fact” from TechCrunch, and after Googling around the interwebs (apologies to @MattCutts) I finally discovered what appears to be the source of this oft cited statistic.
Some other numbers mentioned by Matt are 150 code committers with 1400 on Trac helping out. 21m downloads of WordPress in 2009 with 70m plugin and themes off wordpress.org, with 35 billion pageviews on wordpress.com and .org + 8.5% of the web is running on WordPress. (WordCamp New Zealand)
Note: Emphasis mine
Truthfully I have serious doubts that this stat is even accurate considering:
- Google discovered over one trillion unique URL’s on the web two years ago (and they are still finding more content)
- WordPress has yet to build a search engine to index the web
- I haven’t seen any official sources (like ICANN who also sports WordPress on their blog) verify this claim
- No search engine company that I know of has verified this claim, although truth be told I would only trust Google due to their domination of the search market.
Truthfully I think WordPress powers a large portion of the web (my guestimate is around %5 on the high end) but then again even I don’t have any data to verify if WordPress powers more than 1% of the web, let alone 8.5% that is spouted as fact.
So for now, I’m going to put this in the “pseudofact” file and disregard the stat entirely until someone wiser than I can find an official source (and not simply quote hearsay).
(Image Credit: Norebbo)
Update: Raanan from Automattic (creators of WordPress for you non-geeks) informs me that the stat originally came from a Drupal presentation who were comparing the top million sites (of which 8.5% were powered by WordPress compared to Drupal’s ~1%).
Thanks Raanan!
