Speaking to John Battelle on the opening day of SXSW on Friday, Matt Mullenweg revealed that 12 per cent of the web is now powered by WordPress, proving that the platform is used for much more than just blogging these days. His aim, of course, is to extend this to the majority of the web.
Blogging, however, is far from dead, Mullenweg claimed. "It's growing at an amazing rate. We are adding a new blog every two seconds just at WordPress.com."
Here are some of the main developments at WordPress:
- Inspiration from Twitter and Tumblr. Mullenweg admitted that Tumblr now gets more page views than WordPress and is aiming to claim the gap. "Tumblr do beautiful simplicity. They definitely have a great design and they integrate the photos really nicely." Mullenweg wants to improve the photo experience on WordPress. Twitter, meanwhile, inspired the team to take mobile seriously.
- Ads remain low on Mullenweg's list of priorities. Some ads are shown on WordPress.com but the business model is upgrades. Mullenweg wants to show as few ads as possible and doesn't want to rush into launching something similar to Twitter's promoted tweets and accounts. He said they were very sensitive about putting ads on people's blogs because it's almost like coming into somebody's living room.
- Jetpack: last Wednesday, WordPress launched Jetpack, a plug-in that brings features from WordPress.com to WordPress.org users. The aim is to have no trade-off between the .com and .org versions.
- Guided Transfer: this morning WordPress announced that for $99 they will help you move your WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress.org version
- Spam: WordPress is very vigilant against spam and at peak times deletes up to 5,000 blogs a day.
- Media: although Mullenweg admitted that the team hasn't started work on 3.2 yet, he said he's aiming to make the image, video and audio handling much slicker in the next release.
How would you like WordPress to develop in the future? Let us know in the comments.
