Blogger beats out WordPress, LiveJournal

rebekah - January 27, 2011 · Filed under Statistics, Updates · Tagged stats

One of the things we’re hoping to discover in our research is why bloggers choose different blog platforms. How does someone choose WordPress over LiveJournal, or vice versa? Do bloggers with particular interests gravitate toward particular platforms? What makes bloggers decide to self-host their blogs?

We’re currently in the process of launching our first survey, of 2000 bloggers around the world. While we won’t know why these bloggers use different platforms until we ask them, we are able to determine which platforms they’ve chosen.

Approximately 58% percent of the 2000 blogs in our sample run on Blogger. The next two most popular platforms, WordPress and LiveJournal, make up only 6 percent of our sample each. Rounding out the top six platforms are TypePad, Deviant Art, and MySpace. The remaining 23% of blogs are either hosted on smaller platforms, such as Blog.com or Vox, or self-hosted.

Not every blog service makes its number of users public, but the information we were able to scrape together from individual platforms serves as an interesting point of comparison. As of December 2010, WordPress hosted 16 million blogs and served another 16.7 million users who have downloaded the platform and use it to self-host. Deviant Art claims over 13 million registered members, while LiveJournal has around 29 million accounts, only 2 million of which are active. According to MySpace, the company has around 100 million users, but the site only received 54 million visits last November.