WordPress.com News and Numbers: The October Hot List

With October in the books, it’s time to take a look at the incredible accomplishments of the WordPress.com community over the past month. Coming in the wake of an impressive September, you raised the bar once again.

You’re a (blogging) force to be reckoned with.

You published 36,311,289 posts, with a collective word count of 9,036,553,158 (yes, that’s over nine billion). If each post took two minutes to read, it would still take you 138 years to plough through them.

You hit the “Like” button 7,845,047 times, and engaged with other bloggers to the tune of 63,108,719 new comments. Shy? Not you.

Our carefully selected Freshly Pressed posts received 103,568 views, with 176 new posts added to the Freshly Pressed fold.

Cinque Terre, by eTravelog, was one of 803 entries to a recent photo challenge

You love media.

Smile, you’re on camera! Your blogs featured no fewer than 12,498,187 Flickr images and 2,106,005 new image galleries. Those sleek image gallery carousels? They allowed your visitors to view 133,385,127 images in their glorious, full-size detail.

You jazzed up your posts with 295,313 tracks from SoundCloud, and 20,113 from BandCamp.

Finally, we’d love to know how many kittens fit into 8,853,374 YouTube clips and 364,481 Vimeo movies — because that’s how many videos you’ve embedded in your blogs last month.

You’re a friendly bunch.

You shared 4,972,574 posts with your friends on Facebook, and invited your network to look at 3,144,052 posts on Twitter. Over at Pinterest, your DIY creations — all 1,109,754 of them, to be precise — made quite a splash.

Interaction was clearly on your mind a lot this month: you created 190,208 polls. And, with 189,071 Google Maps embedded, you made sure none of your readers ever gets lost.

You publish things people want to read.

Numerous WordPress.com bloggers enjoy cross-platform success. Last month, Teri Smieja, who writes about her fight against breast cancer at Teri’s Blip in the Universe, published (with Jonathan D. Herman) Letters to Doctors. It’s a book that educates health professionals and family members alike about the challenges of life with cancer.

Fiction writers thrive here as well: thousands of bloggers are currently participating in National Novel Writing Month, including many published writers. In October, for example, horror writer Jack Flacco celebrated the release of his latest ebook, Ranger Martin and the Zombie Apocalypse.

Finally, a good number of last month’s big viral hits originated in blogs here on WordPress.com. Blogdramedy‘s post, featuring some of the most ludicrous tourist complaints ever recorded, was a hit on Facebook and beyond, as was Hannah Brencher‘s popular piece, 25 Things Every Woman Needs to Know.

You write about everything. And then some.

We love to see the tags you use in your posts: it’s a great barometer of the things that interest our collective mind. 

In October, baseball, with 87,618 posts, beat politics (43,941); the Red Sox (1,847) triumphed over the Cardinals (1,329) in more than one way; and dogs (9,291) still had the upper hand (paw?) over cats (5,698). 

Halloween, with 48,589 tagged posts, was clearly on your mind — even more so than education (30,089), your friends (17,669), or romance (14,901).

The late Lou Reed (1,409 posts) and Arcade Fire (571), with their new album, were among the most popular music topics.

Many of you wrote about inspiration (37,504) — perhaps in preparation for NaNoWriMo (4,371) or NaBloPoMo (399)?

Finally, you may be surprised to hear that more of you wrote about the Nobel Prize (625) than about Grand Theft Auto V (584).

We can’t wait to see what you blog about this month. Apparently, you can’t wait for the future, either: in October, already 7,243 posts were tagged Christmas!

An exciting month, community-wide.

October was also an eventful month for us at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

We welcomed eleven new Automatticians (and are always hiring more), and four of us were thrilled to participate, kids in tow, in the Digital Family Summit in Washington, D.C.

Writr, a new WordPress.com theme

Akismet, our anti-spam software, celebrated its 100-billionth nuked message. While we don’t have 100,000,000,000 themes (yet), we did add four gorgeous ones: Collections, Massive Press, The Parisian, and Writr.

To cap things off, we also introduced a new embeddable follow button, launched WPrightnow, a tag that helps you find fresh takes on current events, and made it easy for My Opera bloggers to find a new home on WordPress.com.

November is already off to a great start — stay tuned for more news (and many more numbers!) next month.

Previous installments in this series:

• WordPress.com News and Numbers: The July Hot List
• WordPress.com News and Numbers: The August Hot List
• WordPress.com News and Numbers: The September Hot List

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