Tumblr overtakes WordPress as largest hosted blog platform

For many years the undisputed king of the blogging hill has been WordPress. The platform is produced by software company Automattic, who also make comments system IntenseDebate and spam filter Akismet, and is available in one of two flavours. The software can either be downloaded and run on a private server (such as on this very site), or for more casual users, WordPress will host the blog for you.

However, after many years on top, WordPress was yesterday dethroned by trendy upstart Tumblr. At the time of writing, Tumblr is hosting 21,480,259 blogs, with WordPress some way behind with just below 21 million. Unfortunately we don’t know the exact number as WordPress changed their stats page shortly after Tumblr took the lead to reflect the total number of blogs they “power”, rather than host. Regardless, this is a massive victory for Tumblr, which launched just over 4 years ago. WordPress, by comparison, has been around for over 8 years.

Although WordPress features a more comprehensive suite of site management tools, including stat tracking and a huge array of plugins, Tumblr’s simplicity and slick, modern themes have obviously struck a chord with today’s users. Tumblr has also been scoring credibility points recently by attracting some big corporates to their platform, including the New York Times and MTV. Meanwhile WordPress earlier this week suffered an embarrassing security breach when three popular plugins were infected with malicious code. WordPress responded by issuing a blanket password-reset for all their users.

While Tumblr shows no signs of releasing a white-labelled version of their product for enterprise in the same way WordPress has, they seem to have the measure of the casual blogging market, having notched up almost another one million sign-ups just this week.