WordPress.com growing fast. Over 6 million new blogs in 2010, pageviews up 53%
Automattic's WordPress.com, the commercially run leg of the popular blogging platform is growing incredibly fast, according to its latest statistics. — Automattic tells us that it has seen over 6 million …
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a three-year arc. By November 2007 WordPress traffic had already passed TypePad (Silicon Alley Insider flagged the crossover and asked whether execs were getting rich off it); in 2008 Automattic raised $29.5 million at a reported $200 million valuation even as observers openly questioned how the company would ever generate revenue.
The 2010 numbers are the first hard answer to that question-shaped doubt: over 6 million new blogs and 53% pageview growth validate the freemium model Automattic was already being cited for alongside Dropbox, Pandora, Evernote and Mailchimp in early 2010 — massive free distribution with paid upgrades layered on top.
First-order effects
- TypePad and other paid-hosted blogging services now trail a rival whose audience grew 53% in a single year while giving away the core product — their subscription pitch has to survive comparison with free at scale.
- Automattic's millions of new signups directly enlarge the top of its upsell funnel for domains, custom design and other paid upgrades, the revenue path skeptics doubted back when it took the 2008 raise.
Second-order effects
- Hosted-blogging competitors face forced repricing or differentiation: charging monthly for what WordPress.com bundles free only holds where premium features justify it, squeezing subscription pricing across the category.
- Automattic's October 2010 redirect upgrade shows it hedging against churn to self-hosted WordPress — letting users leave wordpress.com for their own installs keeps them inside the WordPress ecosystem rather than ceding them to rivals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer web publishing consolidates around a handful of free-at-scale platforms funded by upgrade and service revenue rather than subscriptions — the structure Automattic embodied in the 2010 freemium case studies alongside Dropbox, Pandora, Evernote and Mailchimp.
- A persistent tension sharpens: Comscore data from 2008 already showed WordPress traffic approaching Facebook's against a roughly $14.8 billion gap in company valuations, and continued growth like 2010's raises whether publishing-infrastructure valuations can stay that far behind raw audience.
The trend: Consumer web publishing is consolidating around free hosted platforms that convert scale into revenue through paid upgrades and services rather than subscription fees, with Automattic's WordPress.com setting the pace.