WordPress.com Grows By 30 Million

I’m a day late and a dollar short on this story but it’s great to see Microsoft migrate their users to a robust platform that is actively developed rather than shutting down their doors without providing their users any recourse. Upon reading a lot of feedback on the deal, it’s become clear that there is still a large amount of people who don’t understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress the open source project. When folks just say WordPress, that enhances the confusion even further. How many times has this nightmare played itself?

Another thing I’ve seen mentioned a number of times is that there are now only two services where blogging can be done for free, WordPress.com and Blogger. This is not the case. You still have TypePad, Tumblr, and a few other services, despite the argument that they are mostly meant for short-hand publishing. There is a part of me however that would not like to see Blogger be absorbed into WordPress.com because things get pretty boring when you’re not chasing the #1 spot. As confirmed by Matt, the largest group of importers into WordPress.com are from Blogger. Since that’s the case, there is no reason to go after Blogger because Blogger is coming to them, slowly by surely. WordPress.com is in a great position as a hosted publishing service.

To all those who think WordPress can’t scale or be used for large websites, I suppose we’re about to find out as Automattic doubles their user-base. I’m looking forward to a post by Matt or Barry within the next few months that explains what had to be done to make the transition as smooth as possible. Congratulations to all those involved with the deal.