WordPress.com News and Numbers: The September 2013 Hot List
After a red-hot August of publishing news and impressive numbers, we wondered what was next for the WordPress.com community. Here’s a snapshot of September:
You blew up the internet. Again.
Month after month, we’re blown away by what you publish. Talk show host Matt Walsh‘s post, “Dear parents, you need to control your kids,” has racked up more than 2,000,000 views and over 11,000 comments and counting, made a big splash on Reddit, was re-published on The Huffington Post, and mentioned on more blogs and websites than we can count. Like Jon Negroni’s wildly popular “Pixar Theory” post from the summer, Matt Walsh’s open letter was a huge success.
Over on Polémique, KC Schmitz penned a bold and thoughtful piece blurring the lines of feminism: a criticism of the criticism of Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines,” which launched a very lively discussion on the blog, Reddit, many sites on Tumblr, and hundreds of thousands of Facebook walls.
You’ve become go-to experts in the news.
North Carolina-based blogger Emily, who writes about parenting and family issues at The Waiting, was asked to contribute to an article on CNN on kids and online privacy after the correspondent working on the story discovered Emily in a three-part series on parenting blogs over on The Daily Post.
We’re thrilled that an active participant in our community has been recognized as a voice and authority in her field. Got a similar story? Let us know.
You’re busy creating and interacting with others — it’s inspiring.
In September, you created 1,369,067 new blogs, for an average of 45,636 blogs a day. Thursday, September 12, was the most popular day to start a new blog.
You wrote 35,382,026 posts, which racked up a lot of pageviews:
559,032 of these posts were posted by email, while 220 were posted by voice.
You subscribed to 2,711,195 blogs, left 61,210,995 comments on each other’s blogs, and liked 7,448,923 posts. (We love the engagement and positivity!)
You’re mobile and touch device users.
1,392,428,652 pages on WordPress.com were viewed on a mobile device.
Of those pages, 299,822,183 were viewed on an iPhone.
207,818,451 were viewed on an iPad.
And 4,206,986 were viewed on a BlackBerry 10.
You published many posts on current events and topics that matter to you.
Our community is made up of people from all over the world, passionate about many different things. In September:
2,444 posts were about going back to school.
2,990 were about Kenya — and many of these commented on the Nairobi mall shooting.
3,961 were tagged with feminism, while 1,021 were tagged with twerking.
51,316 were about food.
61,747 were about travel.
75,297 were about love.
76,389 were about music.
1,089 posts were about the pope, while 18,304 were about religion.
1,726 were about atheism.
20,121 were about baseball. (Have you written about your favorite MLB team in the playoffs?)
38,309 were about football.
3,231 were about CrossFit.
Finally, 18,919 were about fitness, while 50,988 were tagged with health.
We’re humming along behind the scenes.
In addition to users like you, this community is also made up of people who work on WordPress.com each day. In September, we launched four new themes: Highwind, Nurture, Traveler, and InfoWay. Working alongside a partner, EventBrite, we also announced a pair of themes made especially for events: for one-time events and for those who host events regularly:
Just like our community of users, Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com — continues to grow and work on products and services to make your online experience better. At the end of the month, we announced that Cloudup, a fast and sleek media sharing platform, had joined the Automattic team.
We also relaunched Simplenote, an app Automattic acquired earlier this year, which — true to its name — is a simple way to take and keep notes.
That said, we’re hiring! Fourteen new Automatticians started in September, and we’re looking for more. You can (virtually) meet some of the fine folks who work on WordPress.com and within the Automattic universe in our “Five Minutes With…” series, too.
We can’t wait to see what October brings. Happy blogging!
If you’re interested in keeping up with what’s hot in the community — from popular reads to publishing news and interesting stories about fellow bloggers — subscribe to WordPress.com Weekend Reads, which we’ll deliver right to your inbox.
- October 9, 2013
- Automattic, Community, Stats, WordPress.com
Yay for Emily! Exciting news!
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Wow! What a great month.
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I had over 50,000 views in August. That is a bunch for a photoblog.
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That’s awesome!
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Sadly, all these numbers are saying we need to get off our devices and interact more in person. I find this post rather depressing.
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I see your point. Though I think what we all do online, on our WordPress.com blogs or elsewhere, is really just a slice of what we do each day. I’m overwhelmed and impressed by these numbers — but I think they reflect just a fraction of how we spend our time. We all go about our days, interact with people in person, and create and are part of stories out there in the world — it’s oftentimes the fodder we use to write our blog posts.
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Ops I’m dragging the averages down 🙂
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Wow, that’s a lot of numbers.
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Congratulations, Matt Walsh!!! Love the truth that you write and that you’re not ashamed to write it. Many of us out here sincerely appreciate your integrity. We appreciate your wife and children too! You guys are a blessing!!
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My mind can’t think this high in numbers 😦
INCREDIBLE!
Well done to everyone..
Keep on keeping on..
The best site on EARTH by a large country mile!!
More love, less hate
Shaun
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That’s really powerful! It’s really encouraging to know how much people love to interact with and learn from each other. There’s always a new perspective to discover!
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Thanks for this. I like stats of all sorts, but what I would really like to see are distributions and/or rather than just totals. For instance, are the pageviews distributed evenly across posts? I expect that it is highly non-uniform. Are the pageviews distributed evenly across topics? This too would be non-uniform, but perhaps in very interesting, maybe even unexpected ways. Stats about how people navigate across wordpress blogs or within a blog would be interesting too i.e. what sort of linkage is more effective than others. In fact, there is a whole host of related topics that comes to mind here — how are the “You May Like” blogs in the Reader chosen, and do they “work” i.e. is that proving effective for the community? Should this list consist of blogs or would it work better if it consisted of individual posts? (I have a whole host of other questions too, and some relating to my own blog, but I suppose that’s for another place and time!)
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Thank you, WP. I can’t tell you how many folks have thanked me for distilling all the information out there on diet and cancer and delivering clear, concise summaries on my blog.
Together we can do more. Who said that?
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Smallhousebiggarden expressed a similar thought that crossed my mind, but then Cheri responded with my thoughts exactly. In fact, for me, writing my blog posts absolutely helps me live my life more fully. If I didn’t take the time to write and post, I would undoubtedly missed out on the beauty that surrounds me. Thank God for WordPress!
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Writing my poems and pieces actually helps me live and live anew the joys and even the sorrows of my days; it gives me pause and perspective, and I am ever-thankful for that. In fact, I’ve got a blogging buddy with whom I literally meet up in person and share the graces of posting!
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I disagree with SmallHouseBigGarden’s comment above as I enjoy the interaction between bloggers through reading posts, commenting and replying. I feel that I have got to know people in a worldwide community who I would never otherwise get the chance to meet. I wish I had more time to read more blogs as so many are informative and thought provoking as well as being entertaining. These numbers show just how much stuff is out there waiting to be discovered.
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Excellent 🙂
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I had over 90,000 page views in September. A past article was linked to by Huffington Post. Certainly spiked my readership.
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I never seen any mention of garden/gardening blogs. There’s no theme geared toward us, no mention of our stats or even of our existence? What’s up with that? Maybe I’ve missed it. We’re here too and we’re blogging like crazy!
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While there’s indeed a garden / gardening community on WordPress.com, you’re right — we’ve yet to really feature blogs in this category/niche. There are so, so many communities and circles on WordPress.com — we’ll do our best to feature as many as possible!
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That’s true, there are countless categories, I’m sure… I guess it’s obviously “my area” and I’m always watching for even a brief mention of the gardening community… maybe something for you and or wordpress to consider for the future, Thanks for replying Cheri. Your post was interesting and inspiring!
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I hope one day an article is written (like this) on my blog. I have got 74000 views in the month of September and October as of today.. 🙂 I am loving WordPress!
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I love the fact that to this whole community of WordPress bloggers and readers even baseball was more important than religion (and/or the lack of it), and that football is almost twice as important as baseball, and that neither of these is a topic anywhere near as interesting as food, love, travel, or music. We’re in a mentally healthier and better balanced world than most other information sources would have you think.
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I really appreciate all my readers whether from WP; browsers; sent through email; or on LinkedIn. I find that I get the most traffic during the holiday months. Thanks, WP!
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Wow! Congrats to Matt, KC and Emily, as well as Rob Scubadiver and Team Oyeniyi. Cheri, thanks for the numbers!
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Excellent, awesome, overwhelming, mind-blowing WP is that and more, the figures tell us WP is a force to be reckoned with. Connection, interaction, communities world-wide and don’t forget to mention the challenges. How many different challenges are there happening in the community each week? I love them. They give me an opportunity to stroll down memory lane as I search for a special photo to represent the challenge theme. Would I regularly look at all those thousands of photos stored in the hard drive? I don’t think so. What’s more every time I take a photo I have a WP post forming in my subconscious. Thanks WP team for helping us to connect so effortlessly in cyberspace. Take a bow, a pat on the back, a big bouquet of flowers and countless curtain calls this is one fan that appreciates and loves you all for your dedication.
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This is great news. I am proud to be a part of the WordPress community.
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Hi Cheri, I am happy that I topped 2000 views in four months. It was more than I expected.
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It’s great being part of such a vibrant community. Thanks WordPress.
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We’ve had some very appreciative comments from those who’ve visited our educational site.
2 500 hits per month is really pleasing.
Thank you WordPress.
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Thanks for bringing me back to life. It may be cyber but I am alive and feeling kind of creative.
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Congratulations, WordPress, and fellow bloggers!
My blog is pushing 7 months, and I’m not even a blip in the WordPress firmament. I recently celebrated, when one day there were 175 views (it went downhill after that). Hey, Matt Walsh, 2,000,000 views?? Congratulations!
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Wow! 50,000-90,000plus views in a month!! That’s amazing! I thought getting over 2,000 was good! =( lol! jk. Way to go!! =)
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I love seeing how many different countries view my blog each day. I have even used them as Geography lessons for my youngest who I am homeschooling.
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Great ! Congratulation to him for his 2,000,000 views
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So great to be part of this amazing, high-achieving WordPress family!!
: )))
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Kudos to all my fellow bloggers. I am new on the scene but I’m already excited. WordPress is a wonderful platform and I’m raring to go….
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That is great news and very encouraging – I am looking forward to that type of results!
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Great to see the success of blogging. Just started myself and I’m happy to see the results! Well done to all 🙂
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This makes my 45 followers and 155 total views seem really puny, but then I realize that it takes a lot of grains of sand to fill a beach and every grain is important, even my small contribution.
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Wow! Amazing numbers.Thanks for your post Cheri 🙂
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THESE NUMBERS ARE CRAZY! My goodness!
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Numbers interesting, if not actual commercials embedded, real subject of interest for those who seek them. then only reasons to celebrate, yes!!
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Thank you for including me in this post, Cheri! I am still completely gobsmacked that I was included in the CNN article, and I owe a great deal of the success I’ve found writing to the wonderful WordPress community.
Emily
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Love and music have the most people blogging, and more people are writing about religion than about atheism. Very nice! 🙂
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Wow! The numbers are staggering!
A lot of us have made this place home in a way 🙂 makes me so proud to be a part of this.
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WordPress successfully created a business model that brings success and generates revenue for the company, the developers and the clients. That is why it works. Much like Amazon made money from investing in its future and believing in its business model, WordPres gave people the tools to create and then stepped back and let them use the tools to create themes, blogs, websites, etc.
We at Elegant MicroWeb find that the WordPress tools are intuitive so WordPress development AND WordPress developers are the foundation of eCommerce, forums, news sites, galleries, event management and many other types of sites and content management. Congrats on your success.
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Amazing numbers! It is really fascinating to see some insider informations, like these statistics, and I would be even more satisfied if there were more information about the distribution between countries to see how many people is using it in my country or the countries I am aiming my posts. Also there are no numbers about my field of work, technology news or reviews, more specifically mobile phone gaming. I know it is still a young and not so widespread topic to write about, but this is going to change as the line between mobile and console/PC gaming slowly disappears.
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