Surprise: Traditional Blogging Platforms Still Reign Supreme, comparative activity metrics across blogging platforms using some data from Postrank. I think if they included WP.com users with custom domains we would be double or trip where listed — even more if they included self-hosted.
I’m actually not too surprised by these numbers. I doubt they’re counting all the WordPress sites using their own domain name and such, just the *.wordpress.com ones.
However, I know many people that use Blogger for a simple reason: It’s by far the simplest way to blog. I hate to say that, but it’s true. If you just want to write text and don’t much care about how the site looks, what’s in the sidebar, etc, then it’s really quick and easy to set up a site and write a bunch of posts.
Several friends of mine use it for that exact reason. They just want to write to their friends and such, not to actually run a serious website. I have even had to switch a friend off WordPress sites before (which I was hosting for her, so she had no real worries on that score), over to a blogger site. It wasn’t that she didn’t get WordPress, it was that she simply didn’t want all the functionality. Telling her to just not use it didn’t help, the fact that it was there seemed to make her feel like she needed to do something about it.
Perhaps WordPress should try to capture that market. Make a “simple mode” sort of thing. Eliminate a lot of the settings and such, or fold them down into hidden menus. Make the “new post” screen the main screen, dump the pages entirely, hide all the plugins. Might help for an intro sort of view.
I don’t think it’s a function of being simple or not. It’s hard to imagine a release of WordPress where it becomes less powerful. It’s the elegance of how you present that power and flexibility, however, that determines how intimidating or challenging an interface appears to a casual user. I think there’s also an element of fun that’s important, as I talked about at WordCamp. Apple is, of course, very good at this.
Hey Matt, you’re right those numbers we posted don’t include the custom domain users hosted on wordpress.com. Is there a list of those anywhere, so we can also take them into account?
We’d be happy to send you one. 🙂
That works! ilya at postrank.com should do the trick!
@Otto – that’s correct. The Domain Activity API only accounts for top level and sub-domains, and sites using the WordPress platform but their own domain names aren’t technically WordPress sub-domains. And really, analyzing custom domain sites using WordPress or Movable Type or what have you is a whole ‘nother spreadsheet of analysis.
It’s interesting if you start digging into Blogger profiles at all. (I had a project doing this a few months ago.) It really speaks to the low barrier to entry. Plenty of users have more than one blog, and many of those have long-abandoned blogs with only a few posts. I guess folks had something to say at the time, but got all talked out pretty quickly.
I use both WordPress and Blogger; both have their advantages and disadvantages. Over here (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong), folks love to add java based nonsense into their sidebars, and I know a good few who prefer Blogger for its ability to do that with ease. And surprisingly, Blogger’s option to allow users to modify CSS is a big plus as Chinese characters really could do with larger font sizes.
Personally, I like WordPress: it offers nice templates, simple built in stats and relative ease of use. It is not really that much more complex than Blogger.