WordPress.org

This has been an exciting year for WordPress. We’ve grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

We also conducted our first ever user and developer survey, which got over 18,000 responses from all over the world:

We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. In tough economic times, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. (If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.)

I talk about this data, and much more, in my State of the Word address which you can watch here:

We know there’s more good stuff hidden in there and we’re open sourcing and releasing the raw information behind it. If you’re a researcher and would like to dig into the anonymized survey data yourself, you can grab it here. (Careful, it’s a 9MB CSV.)

There has never been a better time to be part of the WordPress community, and I want to thank each and every one of you for making it such a wonderful place to be. Now it’s time to get back to work, there’s still 85.3% of the web that needs help. 🙂

The annual WordPress conference, WordCamp San Francisco, starts in fewer than 8 hours. The sold out event — three full days of programming for bloggers, developers, theme designers, and professional WordPress users — will be shared with more than 1,000 ticket holders from near and far. If you are one of the many people who wanted to come but couldn’t swing the time off or travel expenses, you should check out the livestream tickets that are for sale. You can even get a conference t-shirt to commemorate your “virtual” participation.

Speakers include members of the WordPress core development team, leaders of WordPress-based businesses, hobbyists, and everything in between. Take a look at the schedules for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and if you see something that sounds interesting (how could you not?), buy a livestream ticket. The stream will start at 16:00 UTC on Friday, August 12.

Viewing Parties

Celebrate your own local WordPress community by calling together some friends and having a livestream viewing party. In the case of regular WordPress meetup groups, if you do a viewing party we will have a process after #WCSF is over whereby attendees will be eligible to buy conference shirts if their meetup group organizer confirms viewing party attendance.

Videos from all the recorded sessions will be posted for free on WordPress.tv within a couple of weeks, but watching the livestream allows you to support WordCamp while providing instant gratification. And let’s face it: the best part is that you’ll know what the heck people are talking about on Twitter using the hashtag #wcsf. 🙂