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Which Blog Platform Do You Use?

posted on November 15, 2007


imageNew data from Nielsen Online shows WordPress.com leaping over SixApart’s TypePad to take second place in the hosted-blog market. Here’s the new top five:

  1. Blogger – 34,104,000 users – up 58% from last year
  2. WordPress – 11,440,000 users – up 444% from last year (wow!)
  3. Six Apart TypePad – 10,601,000 – up 20 % from last year
  4. TMZ.com – 7,107,000 – up 10%
  5. LiveJournal – 3,366,000 – up 27%

imageThe numbers are only for hosted software platforms, so don’t include WordPress.org, MovableType or Drupal.

imageBlogger has a huge lead but I wonder how many of those are active and not spam scraper sites? I remember the days when it seemed LiveJournal was the tool to use for blogging, but I instead went with Blogger. Now I’m a true WordPress convert.

So what platform do you use and what’s your number 1 reason for your choice?


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  • http://www.brianchappell.com Brian Chappell

    WordPress, however I will say its a pain in the ass to get the darn thing SEO friendly, takes a good amount of work. Its real benefit however is the ease in which you can get it up and running.

    I have started using Drupal lately. I find it to be kind of the opposite. Good on the SEO end (automatically blocks alot of the stuff in the robots.txt that you don’t need indexed) but does take a good amount of configuring.

  • http://www.winningtheweb.com Gyutae Park

    WordPress is by far the most powerful and most customizable. There are also many plugins available to expand functionality. I don’t think WordPress going to be just another fad like the others but will be around for a long time to come.

  • http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/ Graham Jones – Internet Psychologist

    I use Blogger, but I host it on my own server, plus I have designed my own template, so that my web site incorporates three Blogger blogs, but it looks like one web site. How I did this is explained at http://www.changingblogger.com

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  • http://www.thevanblog.com Steven Bradley

    I’m using WordPress, but hosted on my site. Agreed that it’s not completely seo friendly out of the box, but it is better than some CMSs I’ve come across.

    I like the active development community around it. Chances are if I think of something I’d like WordPress to do someone else has already thought of it and written a plugin I can use.

    I have heard some good things about Drupal and have noticed more sites switching to it in recent months and it’s something I’ll take a look at for myself when the opportunity arises.

  • http://www.hiswayofchange.com James Bird

    I use wordpress. Looked over the options and the plugin community is what sold me.

    These are what I use to make things SEO friendly:
    All in One SEO Pack
    Robots Meta

    Should take care of all the basic and intermediate issues you have SEO wise.

  • http://www.u-g-h.com Owen Cutajar

    I’ve become a massive WordPress fan.

    My initial days of blogging were in dasBlog (still running at http://www.u-g-h.com/default.aspx), having come from the Microsoft camp and wanting a .Net solution, but after a few years of watching other blog grow and develop, I moved to WordPress. It’s been a great way to teach myself PHP and MySQL and my CSS/Javascript skills have come a long way too, as has my appreciation of Open Source software.

    WordPress itself is a magnificent piece of software, but I think one of it’s strengths is the community that has evolved around it: users, theme designers, plugin authors etc.

    It would be interesting to see similar figures for self-hosted blog platforms.

  • http://www.advicenetwork.com/contest Advice Network

    I use a stand alone app on my desktop called Vienna. (It’s a mac app)

    Pros: It’s fast. Since everything is on my local computer, I can jump from post to post or feed to feed instantly, no waiting for anything to load.

    Cons: If I go to another computer, i can’t log into my feeds.

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    @Advice Network – not heard of Vienna. I’ll check it out.

    I think WordPress can be SEO friendly with just a few tweaks, plugins and careful robots.txt use.

  • http://www.komarketingassociates.com/blog Casieg

    I used to use Blogger but switched to WordPress. Like James, the plugins combined with good word of mouth is what sold me. I am with you in regards to Blogger’s numbers. If you do a blogger or even a blog search with Google you will get a ton of scraper and old blogger sites. How many of the 34 mil do you think are ACTUALLY legit?

  • http://www.gowoodywire.com Allan

    Andy –

    Perhaps you would consider posting a blog about simple things users can do to optimize a wordpress hosted blog.

    I switched from Blogger to WordPress about two months ago. I couldn’t be happier about the way my new blog looks, however I have noticed a slight drop in organic traffic.

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    @Casieg – maybe 34 – not 34 million, just 34. ;-)

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    @Allan – are you on wordpress.com? That’s a little tougher than wordpress.org, but I’ll give it some thought. From what I recall, you can still get to the template code – you just have to pay a little extra.

  • http://www.justindavy.com Justin

    I’ve used WordPress for a few years now and have no intentions of using anything else. There’s a ton of support for it and some really great plugins that make life easy. WordPress it is for me.

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  • http://www.seoposition.com Brian Gilley

    I’m sure you can guess my answer Andy ;-)

    Even though I use Drupal for practically everything, I don’t think Drupal stacks up to WordPress if you just want to run a blog. However, if you’re like Aaron over at SEObook.com or other bloggers who eventually find that they want to build tons of other very dynamic CMS-type functionality – like job postings (classifieds), build custom nodes/content types, control views (content display), and so on, then Drupal or even Joomla is what you’ll need. Not WordPress.

  • http://www.ThinKlear.net/ Chris [TK]

    when I first started blogging I used a web-based platform…

    after that my first blog ran on a Serendipity script… and I also used another script, but I cannot remember its name at this moment :(

    after a period of time I discovered WordPress and since then… it’s my favorite :D

  • http://bushidoblog.com.ar Zen

    WordPress all the way. It has a bunch of useful plug-ins developed by users everywhere. That and it’s fully customizable.

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    @Brian – you, a fan of Drupal? I would have never guessed it. ;-)

    @Zen – that’s one of my reasons why I love WordPress. It seems it has the most third-party plugins.

  • http://zaknicola.wordpress.com Zak Nicola

    WordPress indeed. Such an easy and clean UI, and a fair stat display.

  • http://www.simpletiger.com Simpletiger – Jeremiah

    I love WordPress so much. Very clean and useful, not to mention open base development allowing artists and programmers alike to develop what we all want and need. I think if Google’s blogger doesn’t loosen up the rigidity of the style to the point of flexibility that WordPress has, it will eventually become #2.

  • http://www.dylandarling.com Dylan Darling

    WordPress. I haven’t used it as much as I should lately, but I also use some real estate blogs. REW, AR

  • http://horisly.blogspot.com Horisly

    blogger and wordpress,

  • J

    With all the plug ins and ease of configuration for Wrodpress, I still find blogger the obvious choice because of it’s daddy Google.

    Isn’t blogger the most SEO friendly or perhaps Google Search friendly?

  • http://www.shoesfashionguide.com/ katy

    I’m still choosing. But all my friends use LiveJournal.

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  • http://www.ocface.com ocface

    what about ning?? I know it’s a social network platform, but it works great as a social blog tool.

  • http://blogtillyoudrop.wordpress.com Lolly

    I am a wordpress addict! It looks good and it’s dead easy to use. The WordPress team constantly create new features for WordPress and update us via their blog… WordPress is a community of people, unlike blogger for instance

    Lolly’s last blog post..Flickr photo of the month – August 2008

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  • http://www.istudyathes.com Nico

    WordPress rocks! blogger is waaaay to simple and it doesn’t look that good as wordpress. However the .wordpress.com that is added to the domain is not that nice as .blogspot.com

    Nico’s last blog post..Google Chrome – IE killer

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  • http://www.beyondweblogs.com Naveed Razaq

    what i think, word press is going up, there are many users which are creating accounts in word press, and you will find good themes.

    My site:http://www.beyondweblogs.com is on dotnetblogengine. very good for seo, but there is no so much enhancement as in word press blog platform so i personally believe that word press is better then every other.

    Naveed Razaq | http://www.beyondweblogs.com

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