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.

Image via The Matt Walsh Blog

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.

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