Tag Archives: Stats

2.6 by the numbers

WordPress, ,

Now that we’re now 10 days into the release of version 2.6 of WordPress, it’d be interesting to look at a few of the numbers around it.

  • There have been around 23 thousand downloads per day. (Of just the English version.)
  • According to the update system there are 201 thousand blogs using 2.6 already.
  • That’s about 9% of all known WordPress.org blogs in 10 days.
  • The video in the announcement post has been viewed 665,080 times.
  • There have been over 300 themes submitted to the new Theme directory, which launched just 6 days ago.
  • In the same period (10 days) there were 579,871 downloads of 2,527 plugins.

I imagine 2.6 adoption will pick up after the 2.6.1 release — a lot of people wait for the .1 before upgrading.

How are we celebrating? By working on 2.7!

It should be a fun release both for the features we have planned and also because it might incorporate some of the aspects of Crazyhorse, our experimental bizarro world dev branch which we’re laser-eye-testing in NYC next week. (700 blogs are running 2.7 already.)

Browser Stats

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I’m at An Event Apart in Chicago and Eric Meyer just said that browser statistics were “worse than useless.” More specifically, the only browser share numbers that matter are the one for sites you run, not what the web at large uses. Here’s our browser breakdown from 115 million visits to WordPress.com:

  1. 62.46% – Internet Explorer, sub-breakdown by popular request
    1. 64.10% – Version 6.0
    2. 35.17% – Version 7.0
    3. 0.28% – Version 5.5
  2. 30.74% – Firefox
  3. 3.83% – Safari
  4. 1.78% – Opera
  5. 0.52% – Mozilla

Just for fun, the operating system breakdown:

  1. 90.36% – Windows
  2. 6.73% – Macintosh
  3. 2.19% – Linux
  4. 0.03% – PlayStation Portable

Theme Quality and Downloads

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There’s been a common argument that sponsored themes are higher quality because they were paid for and removing them from the theme directory will make it suck. While I find this argument insulting to the designers who have put their work out there without sponsorship, and having personally looked at hundreds of them I had a general feeling that most sponsored themes were junk, I didn’t really have any data.

Well I ran a few queries against the theme viewer DB a few minutes ago and found out some interesting stats:

  • We’ve removed 2,107 themes so far, or a bit under 60%. Those themes had 2,243,735 downloads total, or about 1,064 downloads per theme.
  • There are 1,737 themes still in the directory and those had 3,480,244 downloads, or about 2,003 downloads per theme.

(There may be some spam themes still left in the 1,737 number, but I think we’ve gotten most of them. The reports have slowed to a trickle.)

So if you assume downloads are a measure of the public interest in a theme, then non-sponsored themes are about twice as popular as sponsored ones.

Of course you might not accept that assumption, and the data is fuzzy, and there are certainly a handful of sponsored themes that are very high quality, but overall the indications are that they were a net drain on the site. Rather than making one-off exceptions to the no-sponsored-themes policy and being accused of favoritism or of having ulterior motives* I’d rather spend time doing things to reward and encourage the people who are making high-quality themes without embedded advertising.

* Which we get enough of already.