Fifty Million

As noted on TNW and Adweek, yesterday we passed over 50,000,000 websites, blogs, portfolios, stores, pet projects, and of course cat websites powered by WordPress. I had the good fortune to celebrate this milestone with a few hundred WordPressers at WordCamp Montreal yesterday. (During my Town Hall I wasn’t aware we had passed the number until someone shouted from the audience.) It’s always fun to pass a big round number and over the weekend many libations were consumed with friends old and new, but ultimately the press has always been more concerned with those top-line numbers than we have in the WordPress community. More sites being created is a good benchmark for our adoption, but ultimately WordPress matters not for the blogs it creates but for the lives it affects. We have some huge opportunities this year, particularly around making our software more accessible to the next 50 or 500 million people who want to have a voice online, something I hope to talk more about at WordCamp San Francisco next month.