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](https://en-blog.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/cinqueterre.jpg?w=720)
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.
![Screen Shot 2013-11-06 at 6.08.45 PM](https://en-blog.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/screen-shot-2013-11-06-at-6-08-45-pm.png?w=720)
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
- November 8, 2013
- Automattic, Community, Stats, WordPress.com
WordPress is an experience… There are some very genuine and sincere bloggers with you, and I am happy to have made new friends.
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Now, if only I good get 0.1 percent of activity from these figures, I’ll be … Just kidding, this made me even more proud to be a member of the WordPress community. 🙂
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36 million posts….thats crazy.
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Incredible numbers! And an incredible community!!
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And y’all are the platform from which birds soar.
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Wonderful numbers! I don’t believe that.
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Let us keep blogging!
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Your extremely positive slant on all this is MOST encouraging [grin]!!!
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It’s fantastic here. Have only been here for a week or two but love the content, love the people. Love the lot. Keep up the great work.
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I have never uploaded any video yet, I guess I am worried it will take too much space up, after all we do have a limit on the size our blogs can be!
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When you embed a video (from YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, etc.), there’s no space being used, since the clip itself is hosted elsewhere. So feel free to include as many clips as you wish!
If it’s your own videos you’d like to show on your blog, you could either upload them elsewhere — for example, to YouTube — and then embed the video in your blog, or go for the VideoPress upgrade, which allows you to upload video directly to your blog.
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Thank you for featuring my book Ranger Martin and the Zombie Apocalypse. I appreciate this wonderful community of bloggers and owe all my success to them. Cheers, folks!
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Our pleasure — and congrats on your new book!
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Thanks, Ben. Can you also correct my book’s name in the mention from “Ranger Jack” to “Ranger Martin”? I’d love to take credit for all Rangers’ zombie kills, but I don’t think he’d like that! Much appreciated!
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Of course — correction made. Apologies for the confusion!
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That is an almighty impressive list of numbers. It will take 138 years to read the October posts? Hmmm….. I wonder if I should post a speedreading course … 🙂
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Hi Ben, How tremendous for writers and for the wonderful staff and community of WordPress! I really do like WordPress for my blog.
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Incredible numbers, yet a little scary. Are there enough readers to keep our stats happy?
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Judging by the incredible amount of interaction going on, I’d like to think there are.
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I love reading these number updates, they’re so much fun – and mind blowing!
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Hey, it feels great to be just a droplet of this huge news and numbers ocean ! 🙂
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I love reading the WP overall stats posts because its like unraveling the universe, there is so much happening out there which we don’t realize nor know about & I take solace in knowing that even though my blog is just a drop in the ocean but it can make a world of a difference.
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Couldn’t have put it better myself.
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This being NaBloPoMo I can’t imagine what the November figures will be like. Extraordinary!
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I love that you do this every month. It is awesome and I use your stats often.
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I just got to say that I love WordPress, I love the format and it is a great community.
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This gives me hope for the world!
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I’m blown away by these numbers! Pretty exciting to be part of such a fantastic group of writers and bloggers!
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I know I don’t stop by enough but I love it and this is WONDERFUL and such a positive way to look at it. I appreciate all the work that goes into it, it shows. Thank you for sharing!
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WordPress provides a great service. I love your cover photo of Italy. I have boated, driven and taken the train to Vernazza and the five villages in Cinque Terre, an UNESCO World Heritage Site, on the rugged coast of the Italian Riviera.
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Awesome numbers. I love our WordPress community. Keep posting family!
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WOW! Those numbers are amazing, and it is so inspiring to see the incredible diversity of the site’s content. I am truly loving my experience with blogging on WordPress; this is my first blog (started over the summer), and although I am still trying to gain a wider audience, I am really enjoying posting daily and reading what other people are writing about. Thanks for keeping track of the numbers so we can see another perspective on the incredible work of other WordPress authors (and administrators!).
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I am new to wordpress and I am loving it. Wish I would have joined the community sooner.. Loving every bit of the experience.
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Quality – Intelligence- class – worth – clear – lucid – progressive – honest – update – international – help – nice – entertaining – moving – educate -funny – teaching – on top of all social and non social media, congratulations and thank you
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WordPress is the Best!
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Glad to be with this great organization of talented individuals.
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Awesome! Thanks for featuring my post (Cinque Terre)!
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because i am an easily distracted person, i read that as ‘hot lust’ instead of ‘hot list’. because i am a bad person, i clicked on it instantly.
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I’m in love with the Writr theme! 🙂
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Hooray for the wordpress community!
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Oh, and don’t worry, cats will triumph in the end! 😀
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What happend to the Blogs I follow prompt!!!? I try to comment, and it takes a loooooong time. if I want to read more, I have to wait for the pop-up then I have to click on th title again. Then making it even worst! when I click and visit a blogpost, the prompt goes all the way to the top instead of continuing down the line of recent posts I want to read further. Gremlins!
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Hi Rommel — I’m sorry to hear you’ve encountered some issues while leaving comments. If you wish, you can go directly to the post you’re reading, without the pop-up window, by clicking in the “X more words” link right beneath the post’s excerpt. Since the post opens in a new tab, the Reader stays where it was, with no need to reload it once you’re done with the post.
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Ahhh! I see. Thanks. I might have missed the post about that change. If not, I think bloggers need to be educated with the same information you just shared. Thanks again. I genuinely love WP because it continues to improve unlike any other blog carriers. But sometimes, I feel like the newer modifications are unnecessary changes. You guys have reasoning for those changes, and we are willing to accept.
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Thanks for this monthly round-up of highlights. I missed out on some of the new WordPress.com feature announcements. It just gets buried in your WordPress.com blog.
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Thanks for the feedback — this blog focuses on new features and various announcements, and we’re always working on things each day, so I understand when you say that things get buried quickly! Glad that this roundup helps to compile some of our month’s news.
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Really, incredible numbers! Congratulations to the entire team! The evolution of WordPress from being a basic blogging service to one of the largest ones in the world is commendable. It’s great to see the progression it has taken while glowing from screens and bringing people together. I have also been using WordPress since 2009 and been observing that it is getting better and stronger. I wish another month of success to WordPress.
DbaiG
Bolee.com
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It has been delightful to be part of such a talented community. Reading all the fascinating blogs is such an inspiration and has given me a lot of new ideas. I am always touched by the generosity of spirit shown by other bloggers.
Well done WordPress for all your helpful hints, I still have a lot to learn, but I am so glad that I chose you.
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