Automattic has teamed up with Federated Media to – finally – allow WordPress.com bloggers to make money from online advertising. The project is called WordAds and if you’re on WordPress.com you can express your interest for the program here.

From the WordPress.com blog, including a fair bit of snark directed at Google:

Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads.

We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad.

You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.

WordAds, which is optional, will let bloggers make money from their blogs by showing “high quality ads from brand advertisers” – this is where Federated Media will come in.

Note that not every WordPress.com blog will be eligible for the program. According to the sign-up page, only publicly visible blogs with custom domains will be considered. Furthermore, selection will be based on “level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog”.

Automattic’s Jon Burke also threw out an interesting stat in the blog post: apparently, more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs come online on a daily basis.

WP Engine, a powerful hosted WordPress platform for existing WordPress.org users, has raised $1.2 million in new funding led by Silverton Partners with angels Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling participating. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also made a strategic investment in WP Engine.

WP Engine, which launched in July of 2010, provides a enterprise-level hosting service for WordPress.org users who are tired of managing servers and doing IT work themselves. WP Engine makes sure blogs have super fast page load times, and scale when hit with a ton of traffic.

Additionally, WP Engine provides all customers with a managed CDN for static content delivery, full daily backups, a complimentary staging area, and consultation on themes and plugins. Monthly plans start at $50 per month. In fact, WP Engine now has an install base of over 30,000 personal and professional WordPress blogs.

This round of funding towards scaling the product, for recruiting, and to ramp up partner relations with other elite WordPress service providers.

Today, Automattic also announced VIP Support for Web Hosts, a new partner program for hosting WordPress sites and blogs (WP Engine is the launch partner for the program). VIP Support for Web Hosts includes advanced systems and developer support for infrastructure-wide issues and improvements; annual review of the client’s entire stack as it relates to WordPress hosting; annual security audit and review of best practices and more.

A few weeks ago, we heard that the San Francisco Port Authority had red-tagged Pier 38 — putting up warnings that the space was unsafe. This is a big deal because Pier 38 is something of a tech hub. It’s home to tenants including Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures, 99 Designs, EGG HAUS, and more.

While Robert Scoble grabbed some pictures showing just how serious these notices were — it’s never good to see a big red sign with the word “UNSAFE” on the door to your business — Polaris’ Ryan Spoon downplayed the warnings. Here’s what he said to us at the time:

Over the last few days, Pier 38 has undergone a management change (we have always been sub-tenants). The City of San Francisco has notified Pier 38 building management of specific code violations. We are in close contact with building management and the port authority – and we have been informed that normal operations should continue at this time. Meanwhile, the pier is as vibrant and active as ever: home to Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures, 99 Designs and many more. We’re working to better understand what the management change and ports plans mean for us all.

Fast forward to last week. The Port Authority put up new signs indicating that all tenants had to vacate the property within 30 days. But some tenants were trying to negotiate ways to extend this window, and there was hope they could do that. But today, after a meeting between the Port Authority and the Pier 38 tenants, that hope has died. Everyone must be out by September 30.

Again, this is awful news for the tech community that has thrived in the space which resides right on the water in the city. An important part of WordPress operates out of here. And the Dogpatch space Polaris set up gave a first home to startups like Instagram.

Reached for comment, Spoon confirms the decision today and writes:

The Port Authority of San Francisco notified all Pier 38 tenants, including us, that we must move out by September 30th. This is obviously unfortunate for the Pier and for the Dogpatch Labs – which has hosted over 250 entrepreneurs and 100+ companies like Instagram, Formspring, TaskRabbit, Recurly, Yardsellr, LOLapps, Appjet, etc. In total, these companies have raised over $100m in seed and venture funding. We are actively working on finding a great new Dogpatch Labs home and hope to be settled and taking applications by end of Q3.

In a blog post on the WordPress.com blog, Automattic‘s Justin Shreve this morning acknowledged his employer’s aspirations to turn WordPress.com into more of a platform than a mere Web-based blogging software service.

The company has added support for authentication protocol OAuth 2 to WordPress.com and is debuting a brand new developer portal.

Starting today, WordPress.com supports OAuth 2, an open authentication protocol that basically makes it easier for third party apps to connect with WordPress.com blogs through secure API authorization. That means developers can configure their applications to be able to access a WordPress.com blog without ever asking for personal details such as a password or username.

However, somewhat hidden on the contact page of the new developer portal you’ll find that OAuth2 client access will be granted only on a limited basis for the time being.

The only app using it today appears to be Memolane.

The developer portal contains documents and resources aimed to help developers use WordPress.com technologies to build applications. The portal is fairly sparse t this point, but Automattic says it will be adding more resources and tools as its developer ecosystem grows.

The latest stable version of WordPress, 3.1, was first released on 23 February 2011.

Now, less than 5 months later, the blogging software has been downloaded over 15 million times according to a tweet posted mere minutes ago (and the download counter).

Joomla just recently announced that its software has been downloaded 23 million times (note that this is the total number, not for any specific versions of the software solution).

For your information: WordPress 3.1 is what TechCrunch uses to power most of its sites.

The latest version of the popular blogging software product is actually WordPress 3.1.4, which is a maintenance and security update for all previous versions.

Just yesterday, a blog post about the next version, WordPress 3.2, was published, revealing that it will be released ‘very soon’ (release candidate here).

WordPress 3.2 will finally drop support for Internet Explorer 6.

Related: Automattic Hits 300 Million Unique Visitors, Roughly $10M In Revenue

Today, WordPress.com is making two premium themes available to users: Headlines by WooThemes, and Shelf, by the Theme Foundry. Headlines’ magazine-like theme includes a Featured Post slideshow, multiple menus, and 15 different color schemes. Headlines and Shelf will be available for one-time prices of $45 and $68, respectively. Additional premium themes will be rolled out later in the year.

While not monumental news, premium themes will give millions of WordPress.com users the ability to upgrade the design of their blogs to a more professional looking interface. And for Automattic, this opens up a brand new revenue stream for the company. We’ve heard Automattic makes a little under $1 million a month from all its services, with most of this revenue coming from premium services. Automattic also just announced that its network of sites (including WordPress.com, Polldaddy, IntenseDebate, and Gravatar) crossed over the half billion mark for monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Schneider were interviewed by our own Alexia Tsotsis at Le Web 10 today. Our live notes (paraphrased):

Can you talk about your vision from blogging and how it changed from 2003 to 2010?

I really wanted software for my own blog, there was no Javascript at the time. By the time people started to really think about Web apps, WordPress was becoming more than just a blogging tool, but more of a CMS.

So now people use it to power their websites not just their blogs.

What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? You transferred the trademark recently right?

Tricky one.

We started as an open source project, but where we were in 2005 we weren’t sure how to take it to the next level. What if it could be one-click simple, so that became WordPress.com. And then millions of people started using it, but we still had to consider the .org part.

We looked at the situation, and we decided the trademark belongs in a non-profit organization.

What are the challenges of building a business based on open-source technology?

The biggest challenge is to start a business based on an open-source project that wouldn’t actually kill the open source project and scare away the community. Our goal has been for both to reinforce each other, and it has worked. Both have seen growth.

How big is WordPress?

There are about 30 million publishers right now. That’s roughly 10% of all websites in the world. We’re currently getting about 300 million unique visitors on WordPress.com a month.

Are you making money?

We’re focused on growth right now, so we’ve invested a lot in infrastructure and so on. We haven’t been focused on revenues so far, but I can tell you we’re break-even.

How big is the company right now?

We’re about 74 people.

(TechCrunch: we hear that Automattic makes a little under $1 million a month from all its services combined. That’s roughly $10 million a year, based on what we’ve heard from reliable sources.)

Where does most of the revenue come from?

Most comes from premium services, the hosting service etcetera.

What’s the exit potential for Automattic?

Our goal’s not to be acquired.

First of all, the widget itself has been prettied-up quite a bit from the one we shared. You’ll now see author icons next to the author names. More importantly, you’ll see a plus sign, which, when clicked, presents a drop down that shows you exactly what stories by that author are brining in traffic on any given day. WordPress.com also removed the number of posts area, after that caused some confusion. “the top spot is not about who wrote the most posts, it’s about which author wrote the posts that got the most visits,” they note.

WordPress.com says that they liked the new icon and drop down so much, that they’ve also added it to the Referrers box as well. The result is a simple way to see things like which Twitter account is sending the most traffic your way. Pretty nifty.

WordPress.com says the stats upgrade is available for all blogs on WordPress.com and it will automatically appear if your blog has two or more authors with traffic on their posts. Automattic also notes that these features will be coming to the Stats plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs shortly.

WP Engine, which launched in July, provides a enterprise-level hosting service for WordPress.com blogs or for WordPress.org users who are tired of managing servers and doing IT work themselves. WP Engine makes sure blogs have super fast page load times, and scale when hit with a ton of traffic.

One request WP Engine received was for extra security and backup services. VaultPress not only backs up all data on self-hosted WordPress blogs, but also monitors sites for suspicious activity or a hacking and will eventually fix issues automatically. WP Engine found VaultPress to be complimentary to their service, and struck a deal with Automattic to allows their users to automatically have access to use VaultPress for their blogs.

So by using a WP Engine WordPress site owners will be able to access a ‘golden ticket’ to VaultPress. WP Engine is the first company to partner with VaultPress and Automattic in this way. As of now, you can only get a ticket through Automattic or WP Engine.

WP Engine starts at $50 and VaultPress costs around $15 to 20 per month, so combining the combined services are fairly easy on the wallet.

Disclosure: TechCrunch currently uses the VIP hosted version of WordPress.com.

Photo Credit/IMDB

Joe Wilcox at BetaNews has posted a must-read article in the wake of the announcement – made at TechCrunch Disrupt SF – that the Redmond software giant would be transitioning all its Windows Live Spaces users to Automattic‘s WordPress.com platform.

You may recall Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, stating that there were roughly 30 million active Windows Live Spaces accounts.

Wilcox, however, has managed to obtain internal e-mail messages exchanged between (yet unnamed) Microsoft employees that suggest far lower numbers.

However, according to a senior Microsoft manger e-mailing colleagues: “The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M ‘blogs’ — most are dead. WordPress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a ‘who has the best online service for blogging for our customers’ and had nothing to do with technology.”

Ouch – so basically most of the 30 million so-called active blogs are in reality dead, and Microsoft expects a mere 300,000 sites to effectively migrate to WordPress.com (which currently hosts just south of 14 million blogs).

Wilcox points out, correctly, that it’s not unusual for companies of any size to overstate statistics that aren’t otherwise easily confirmed for PR reasons. That’s undeniable, but it doesn’t justify the fact that Microsoft not only overstated the number of active Windows Live Spaces accounts to the press, but presumably also to the startup it was partnering with.

For context: the email exchange wasn’t centered around the number of Spaces accounts, per se. In fact, the conversation that was leaked to BetaNews revolved mostly around the fact that Automattic runs WordPress.com from Linux servers, something Microsoft (which offers an alternative platform named Azure) was obviously uncomfortable with.

The senior Microsoft manager emphasized customers and not technology for a reason. Earlier in the exchange, Microsoft decision-makers debated about customers moving from Internet Information Server running on Windows Server to ngix running on Linux. “I’m hoping for a second half to this story, where we’re hosting these WordPress sites on Azure…moving 20+ million to Linux seems like shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of securing the platform,” wrote another Microsoft employee.

Microsoft’s PR agency has responded to the leaked emails, suggesting the “30 million active users on Windows Live Spaces” actually included both authors and visitors. It clarified further, saying the real number of active authors is closer to 7 million.

Automattic has also commented to Wilcox on the story, saying that, while the company doesn’t have an exact estimate for how many Spaces bloggers will move over to WordPress.com in the next 6 months, it has seen close to close to 50,000 migrations in the first 48 hours, which it deems “very promising”.

In a comment on this Guardian article, Paul Kim, VP of User Growth at Automattic, adds that “if there are only 300,000 actual active blogs (1% of 30 million), we’ll be able to determine that very soon”. Note the word “only” in that comment.

Automattic also made it perfectly clear that it doesn’t plan to host any WordPress.com blogs on Windows Azure for the foreseeable future.

Microsoft says that it decided that instead of building its own competing blogging service, it should go with WordPress’s fleshed-out feature set, which has 26 million users and powers over 8.5% of sites across the web. Users will be migrated through a process that preserves all of their content, and will automatically redirect visitors who head to their existing Microsoft Live Spaces sites.

Users will have a few choices when they hit the transition page: in addition to transferring their content to WordPress, they can also opt to download and store it locally, delete it entirely, or put off their decision for a while). But Microsoft is going to be killing off the existing Spaces product in six months, so they users won’t be able to put off the decision indefinitely. When Live users go to establish a new blog, they’ll be directed to a WordPress signup screen.

Schneider says that this isn’t a financial deal.

Another feature launching as part of the partnership is the ability to connect WordPress.com blogs to Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger. The feature is pretty straightforward: publish a new post on your WordPress blog, and Messenger will send notifications to your friends’ feeds.

Continuing live coverage can be found at our day one omnibus post. Don’t forget to tag your disrupt-related posts and media with #tcdisrupt!

What this means is that the key ingredient behind Automattic is now in the hands of the organization in charge of “promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity.” So why do this? Mullenweg says it has been his goal since the beginning to blend a non-profit business, a for-profit one, and not-just-for-profit one under one banner. Now that he feels each of those aspects is stable enough, he wants that main banner, WordPress, to be “protected” as a “beacon for open source freedom.”

With a quarter billion people now using the WordPress.com product — and with other for-profit products doing well (we use WordPress VIP to host TechCrunch, for example), Automattic clearly feels they can afford to lose their biggest asset. And Mullenweg thanks Automattic’s Board for allowing this transition to go down.

“I know in my heart that this is the right thing for the entire WordPress community, and they followed me on that. It wasn’t easy, but things worth doing seldom are,” Mullenweg notes.

This move ensures that WordPress will live on as a project no matter who is in charge of the for-profit business or what happens to it. If this is about legacy, Mullenweg seems to have just cemented his. Good move.

Currently in private beta, VaultPress is a plugin users can download that acts as a backup service for your blog. Not only will the software help keep your blog up and running, but it will also soon monitor your site to alert you if their is suspicious activity or a hacking. Alternatively, VaultPress will eventually update your blog with security hot-fixes automatically. VaultPress will be a paid service and will probably be in the ballpark range of $15 to 20 per month, according to Automattic VP of User Growth Paul Kim. At first VaultPress will be extended on an invitation only basis and will eventually be open to the public in the near future.

While users can still use outside services or WordPress community plugins, VaultPress will be the only WordPress.com branded offering. And the plugin is tightly woven into WordPress.com infrastructure, promising greater operability, says Kim.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg says VaultPress is one of the most advanced technologies that he’s seen interact with WordPress. The vision of the service is to ensure that every piece of content on WordPress-powered blogs and sites are safe, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups.

VaultPress as a product makes sense for WordPress.com and frankly, I’m surprised that the blogging platform didn’t roll this out earlier.

Disclosure: TechCrunch uses the VIP hosted version of WordPress.com.

This morning, a blogging platform and a microblogging platform have become more symbiotic. WordPress has enabled posting and reading the blogs the platform powers via the Twitter API.

This means any Twitter app that supports a custom API URL can be used to either post updates to your WordPress.com blog, or to read updates from blogs you’ve subscribed to. Tweetie 2, an iPhone and desktop Twitter client, will be one of the first third party apps to implement this.

As Twitter’s traffic continue to grow, WordPress sees its growth also rising. It makes sense to become more symbiotic with the Twitter ecosystem, considering the rapid growth of the use of third party applications. In fact, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg told ReadWriteWeb recently that WordPress was trying to develop more ways for Twitter and its platform to overlap.

The integration of WordPress functionality with Tweetie is actually pretty cool. All you need to do is add your WordPress account to Tweetie’s settings and you will then be able to post a status update to your WordPress.com blog and also have it displayed in the blog reading view. You can also enable geotagging to show the location of your status update.

While there has always been the possibility to subscribe to blogs by e-mail using FeedBurner or other RSS facilitators, WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic has now added an email subscription feature to the popular free blogging service.

To enable this, simply install the Blog Subscription widget on your WordPress.com blog and you’ll enable anyone to get updates from your blog in their e-mail inboxes, whether they’re WordPress.com users or not, on a per post basis, daily or weekly. Evidently, all subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner and can be canceled at any time.

E-mailed blog posts will come in as HTML, although users can opt to receive them in plain text too should they still be using a mail client sans HTML reading capabilities (seriously, does anyone still use those?).

I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that Automattic has only added its very own e-mail subscription feature now, on the verge of entering the year 2010. E-mail is such a huge deal still, and shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought even by ‘new media’ companies like them.

Good thing they ask us to stay tuned, because they have a ‘lot more plans for email’. What, like the ability to send in blog posts for publication by e-mail like Posterous and Tumblr have been doing for quite a while? Update: as Automattic’s Ranaan points out in comments, that was already possible, my bad. Looking forward to their future plans with e-mail.

(You can subscribe to the TechCrunch e-mail newsletter here)

Automattic has acquired spelling plug-in After The Deadline, which adds spelling, style, and grammar checking to web applications. WordPress and Automattic co-founder Matt Mullenweg announced the acquisition in a blog post.

After The Deadline is an impressive ( WordPress founder Mullenweg was “blown away” by its functionality) spellchecker that lets you customize how the tool analyzes content. Mullenweg says that the new plug-in is already enabled for WordPress blogs. You can go to the proofreading settings in your profile, and then enable After The Deadline by clicking on the icon in the Visual Editor toolbar that has ABC and a green checkmark on it.

The new spellchecker will read your content as you write it and then underline errors and spelling mistakes (red for spelling, green for grammar, blue for style). Similar to other spell check applications, when you click on a flagged word or phrase, you will see a suggested correction, and you can see an explanation of why it’s an error. You can then choose to accept or ignore it.

After The Deadline’s founder Raphael Mudge says the deal was completed in July. The startup will continue to upgrade the tool, though under the Automattic banner. And After The Deadline’s plug-in will remain free for non-commercial use and will soon add support for different languages.

It will be interesting to see when and if this useful feature will be fully integrated in the WordPress hosted blogging software suite. There’s no doubt that a default Word-level spelling and grammar checker is a desirable feature for any blogger. But WordPress didn’t do this with IntenseDebate, the commenting software it bought last September.

WordPress made waves in the blogosphere yesterday when it enabled RSSCloud in post feeds, which is a way for people to get push notification that your RSS feed has updated.

http://v.wordpress.com/4aIs4QvY

Given that the product has only been out of beta since September 2008, that gives you an idea of just how much junk travels the digital highways. According to Mollom co-founder Dries Buytaert (also the creator of Drupal, one of the most used open source content management systems in the world), the solution is now used by about 10,000 websites across the globe, and the rate at which it is blocking spam messages from appearing on the Web is rapidly increasing. In a blog post, Buytaert says Mollom reached the 25 million blocked spam messages milestone five months ago, and got to the point where it filtered out 50 million of them only two months ago.

The full scorecard, as publicly posted on the company website:

“Mollom is currently protecting 10,052 active websites. The average efficiency is 99.93%. This means that only 7 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. Mollom has caught 100,537,961 spam messages since it started. Today we caught 297,061 spam messages. On average, 89% of all messages are spam.”

In reality, the number of filtered junk messages is much higher, since he doesn’t take into account private servers it operates on behalf of larger clients and only counts the ones that get blocked on public servers. About 4 million of comment and post spam messages per month get filtered out of just one social network, the rapidly growing Netlog, with which it struck a deal two months ago. In aggregate, Mollom is processing up to 150 million messages a month, which translates to the company needing to handle over 200 million HTTP requests to analyze them appropriately.

That’s a lot of viagra selling drivel for you.

The takeaways:

- BuddyPress, which is supposed to transform an installation of WordPress MU into some sort of a white-label social networking platform, is going to be launched ‘relatively shortly’. Mullenweg calls it “Facebook-in-a-box”.

- The latest version of WordPress (version 2.7.1) is seeing about 27,000 downloads a day (the built-in auto updater helps a lot, apparently).

- WordPress.com saw 175,000+ new blog posts from a little under 200,000 bloggers in the last 24 hours (translated to about 44.5 million words) alone. A quick look at the site’s comScore stats pegs monthly uniques to have reached 24.4 million U.S. visitors last month, compared to 48.3 million for Blogger and 13.3 million for Six Apart services. For reference, Facebook’s March traffic was at 61.2 million unique visitors.

- Real-time status updating is not threatening regular blogging, according to Mullenweg. When asked if Twitter is sucking the life out of blogging, he responded that blogging is not slowing down and that the service is actually quite complimentary with WordPress.

- Automattic acquired 3 companies last year (IntenseDebate, PollDaddy and BuddyPress) and is definitely considering doing more of that. Mullenweg says “it’s fun” but that he’s not planning on making any announcements shortly because he’s still waiting for the prices to go down.

Here’s the full interview:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4182334&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for an undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts).

There appears to be a plugin rollup strategy of sorts underway at the highly decentralized blogging startup, one that will result in the absorption of features into the WordPress codebase that are currently provided through extensions. Automattic recently purchased Intense Debate, a small TechStars startup working on an advanced commenting platform. Further back, it also acquired Buddy Press, a project for layering social networking features onto WordPress, in March and Gravatar, a universal avatar system, last Fall.

Like Intense Debate, Polldaddy doesn’t offer its technology to WordPress publishers alone – and it doesn’t plan to phase out its support for other platforms post-acquisition. But we can expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily towards improving WordPress – both the open source version offered at WordPress.org, but even more importantly the hosted version at WordPress.com (with which Automattic can actually make money). PollDaddy has already been baked into WordPress.com for its 4.4 million bloggers.

Given the economic concerns that many startups (domestic and global) have in these volatile times, I’m sure that both PollDaddy and Intense Debate are happy to have found a home within a larger and better funded startup. The fact that PollDaddy is based in Ireland shouldn’t have much impact on Automattic’s corporate structure. As CEO Toni Schneider explained at a recent Startup2Startup event, Automattic has no central office and all its employees work remotely from home, only to meet up a couple times per year as a company.

Today at the TechStars demo day, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced that it has acquired enhanced commenting system IntenseDebate for an undisclosed amount.

WordPress has long been in need of an upgraded commenting system, which has led to a number of replacement and augmented systems in the last year, including Disqus and JS-KIT. WordPress CEO Toni Schneider says that better commenting has been on the blogging platform’s roadmap for some time, and that IntenseDebate’s team and technology made the company a good target for acquisition.

WordPress 2.7 will include some of IntenseDebate’s features by default, including threaded commenting. The service will also introduce a plugin that tightly integrates the rest of IntenseDebate’s other features, like aggregated commenting across multiple blogs.

In a blog post announcing the deal, IntenseDebate says that it will now be re-entering private beta, though the service’s current users will still be able to use it. IntenseDebate will stay a separate service that will be tightly integrated in WordPress, but will also be available for other platforms (Akismet’s spam filtering has been used in a similar manner).

IntenseDebate originally launched to the public last October, sporting features including OpenID support, user profiles, and the ability to track a user’s comments across multiple blogs. Since launch the site has seen impressive growth, reporting at least a 25% increase in users each month.