Categories
WordPress

State of the Word 2011

Just in case you missed yesterday’s State of the Word presentation, it’s now available on WordPress TV:

The slides are also available on Slideshare.

Here are some key takeaways from yesterday:

  • We had over 1,000 people attending WCSF and many more watching the livestream, making it the biggest WordCamp yet.
  • The survey of 18,000 WP users revealed some interesting data, like a median hourly rate of $50 and that 6,800 of the self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally.
  • WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever.
  • WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads, and we’re doing a lot of work to make the plugin experience more seamless.
  • 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world use WordPress.
  • 22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress.

In true WordPress fashion, we’ll be open sourcing the raw survey data so people can slice and dice it their own way to find interesting trends or patterns, like breaking down the hourly rates by geography.

Special thanks to Pete Davies, who was responsible for the survey and helping craft the narrative of the keynote, and Michael Pick who did the same and also designed all the slides and animations you saw. Michael is going to prepare a blog post with all of the inspirations and allusions in the slides for those of you curious about the story behind the design.

Update: Raw data and a few other updates are now available on WordPress.org.

60 replies on “State of the Word 2011”

After watching your presentation, my biggest question is this:

Are you going to be uploading your slides someplace (Slideshare) where I can grab them and make wallpapers out of them? Because that would be sort of great.

I personally am a big fan of classic jazz in general, and most especially the beautiful album art of that period; that was a beautiful presentation, Matt, and your team should be commended for their hard work.

So easy a cave man can do it… my favorite take-away from my first WordCamp, but really the biggest take-away was the sense of *family* I got from being there. Thanks for making that possible.

Its great Matt that you shared the State of the Word’11. I joined WordPress since v2.5 and absolutely loved it since.

Cheers from India.

Any chance the VideoPress bug keeping this video from playing back on iOS devices is going to be fixed soon? I’m eager to watch but won’t be on front of flash enabled desktop/laptop for a couple of days.

I can’t turn the sound on while at work, so I will look forward to watching it when I get home 🙂
I like “マット” seal on p.1 of the slide! Your idea or Michael’s?

Matt – really enjoyed seeing your presentation this last weekend and can’t wait to see WordPress become an even better platform. Thanks for making it happen!

Love what you do and perhaps WP is the best example on new jobs creation – not by tax breaks, social incentives, … but by giving people tools to create their own job. Looking forward to 30% market share 😉

Thanks for sharing this video (and with the embed feature, couldn’t see that on wp.tv). Definitely some amazing samples of the survey data. I’m really looking forward to seeing the full results when they are published.

Oh and thanks for that whole setting up WordPress thing as well 😉

Matt Howdy. It is exciting to see the growth wordpress has experienced in the last few years. Started using WP last yr and it has changed my life, just like a lot of other people in my country.

@ŽELJAN “perhaps WP is the best example on new jobs creation – not by tax breaks, social incentives, … but by giving people tools to create their own job”

On behalf of Nigerian WordPress users,I want to say thanks Matt. Thumbs UP!

I still believe WordPress does not receive the credibility it should get. People do not always realize how powerful and efficient it can be.

But one thing remains: numbers talk!

I love the direction WordPress is going, and I’ve been with you since 2006, but please, on the Admin backend, there should be Core Settings and Plugin Settings. Either that, or shift all setting panels of plugins to the actual plugins page. Mostly it’s just confusing to have some plugins put their settings under Settings, some plugins take their own Admin sidebar menu, and some not even put settings in the Admin sidebar at all. Some rationalization of that sidebar would help a lot. Thanks. My second suggestion is to find a way to break the old rule that you can’t run a WordPress site with more than 20 plugins. If you really want WordPress to expand, you need to encourage creation of more functionality in more plugins, and either include a lot of plugin functionality in core, and allow for more plugins to be added, or find the way to allow for 50+ plugins to not break the resource ceiling. My 2 cents

best wishes from Cairo, Egypt

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS