WordPress Now Powers 22 Percent Of New Active Websites In The U.S.

Blogging software WordPress is announcing a number of impressive growth stats today. WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. These stats apply to both WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites.

You can also check out Founder Matt Mullenweg’s ‘State of the Word’ adress at WordCamp San Francisco last week. In July, WordPress.com blogs passed the 50 million mark. At the time, WordPress revealed that each month, 287 million people account for 2.5 billion pageviews on WordPress.com blogs.

In his speech, Mullenweg says that WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and has seen 200 million plugin downloads. WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade speed in the blogging platform’s history.

Today, WordPress is also releasing the findings of a user and developer survey, which got over 18,000 responses from users around the world. Mullenweg says that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50.