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Culture

Open source drives Wordpress to 6.5 billion page views

Wordpress is demonstrating how open source can be used to greatly improve one's business.

Matt Asay

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg recently delivered a "state of the nation" address at WordCamp, Wordpress' user and developer conference. It turns out that open source can be very good for business. Very, very good.

Consider this growth at Wordpress:

  • Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
  • 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
  • 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
  • Two million new blogs created for the year
  • 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)
Wordpress is an open-source blogging platform at its heart. The Wordpress.org project is actively developed by Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, but also by the community, which joint collaboration results in new features rolling out on a daily basis. Wordpress.com then takes these improvements and packages them for the masses:
Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat's home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.

It's a model that is delivering significant results. Perhaps "community" is an overused term, but at Wordpress/Automattic, it actually means something. It means development, but that development has translated into exceptional growth.