As I said I’d do last week I’ve closed the latest Poll of the Week off because it was beginning to take over my sidebar. I found the results quite interesting. The question asked:
What Blog Platform Do You Use Most?
The results had a few surprises for me. While I was expecting a large showing for WordPress (around 37% of the 1000 respondents) I was intruiged by the large number of ProBlogger readers using the free hosted Blogger.com platform (22.2% – or 222 readers). This figure was almost triple the number of Movable Type Bloggers. Another surprise to me was the large numbers of Blog platforms that I’d never heard of before. By the end of the poll there were 49 options. Thirdly I was interested that 2% of those taking part use some sort of ‘custom made’ blog platform (sometimes even hand coded).
I’ve graphed the results of the top 13 platforms (each had 10 or more responses) and grouped all the ‘others together’. The full results with all the ‘other’ platforms are listed below the fold.
Graphic powered by Keynote (click to enlarge a little).
Full Results
WordPress.org – 371
Blogger.com – 222
Movable Type – 81
Expression Engine – 40
TypePad – 35
WordPress.com – 32
Drupal – 25
Custom Made Blogs – 20
Text Pattern – 17
LiveJournal – 13
Mambo – 11
Nucleus – 11
b2evolution – 10
.Text – 9
Xanga – 9
SquareText – 8
SubText – 7
Geeklog – 7
Blogharbor – 6
DotClear – 6
Serendipity – 5
MySpace – 4
dasblog – 4
Joomla – 4
Pivot – 3
Blogzerk – 3
Typo – 3
Powerful Intentions Community – 3
DotNetNuke – 2
Bitacoras – 2
LivingDot – 2
iblog – 2
Sulekha – 2
xoops – 2
pmachine Pro – 2
Bloggers.it – 2
Tattertools – 2
City Desk – 2
BlogSoft – 1
Rediffblogs – 1
Jroller – 1
Community Server – 1
weblog.ro – 1
dotclear – 1
Blogsite – 1
mojblog – 1
Boast Machine – 1
Blog Drive – 1
Scoop – 1
In my opinion that is very interesting as most blogs I see are on Blogger, Textpattern or Live Journal. Interesting to see how many use what. I think there is lots of growth left in the major ones, and I also think that had you done this same poll before Movable Type’s pricing model (and thus back when WP was a 1.2 release), things would be a little different.
Anil Dash should pop his head in here telling you that the results are unscientific and skewed. :-)
I have had a lot of problems with blogs I have started on Blogger. It could be that I am more comfortable with WordPress because a lot of people swear by it.
Worth noting is that Expression Engine now has a free version.
Am I the only one to use Dotclear ?
A very good french platform, but only in french actually… :(
It would be interesting to see how much the wordpress.com faction would grow if wordpress.com hadn’t only been around for a few months. Especially as opposed to blogger.com. I find it fairly interesting that most of the respondents used wordpress.org as it requires hosting. Of course I also think that that is the reason that blogger.com is as high as it was. free is a keyword there…
I’ve only ever tried out WordPress so far and all I can say is that I haven’t felt the need to try out something else as it just worked for me!
I’d love to try out something else but I don’t know how to get them working on my computer to save me having to upload a blogging platform to the web just to test it out a bit!
It’s interesting to see people custom code their blog platforms, I would love to see some of the blogs that have a custom coded platform to see if it’s noticable.
Roll your own — it’s more fun.
Actually, I rolled my own because there was a lot of tracking I wanted to put in place to watch visitors that you really can’t do with the other blog software. There aer few features that I wish I had, but for the most part, it works pretty well.
I find it very interesting that MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360 and AOL Journals didn’t even register. I somehow missed the poll — I use Movable Type
It would be interesting to know how many Blogger users don’t use blogspot.com for their hosting, but instead upload to their own web server.
I think that may people use PHP sw because they come preinstalled on common hosting services, and are very community oriented.
The .NET platforms are much more “enterprise oriented”, very few features, but well tested and developed
But hopefull SubText will change the market
Kind of unrelated, but is that the new iWork you’re using ? How is it?
I have total 5 blogs:
3 run using blogger.com and hosted on my own hosting
2 run using wordpress.org
When I need something simple, I got for blogger.com and when I need some advance stuff, I go for wordpress.org
I am using blogger.com since early 2004 and it rocks :)
I have two blogs currently on blogger but Im growing more and more tired of the login problems and having my blog treated as a splog by blogger. Im learning wordpress now and will be moving off blogger real soon.
Glen…good move! I switched from Blogger to WordPress about five months ago and the difference is like night & day.
If you’re going to put a huge amount of time into a blog – let alone try to make money from it – it just seems dangerous to leave that much control in the hands of someone else.
Would you build a business that relied on a third party for its very existence?
WordPress just plain works :) Good luck!
With the limitations and reliablity problems of Bloggers, it’s a real shame it’s so popular, isn’t it?
er, Bloggers=Blogger
I used Blogger for the last few months on 2 blogs but I was hosting them on my own server. This last week I moved them and started another on WordPress 2.0 and it is amazing how much better it is. Now I just have to learn how to create my own templates again…
I agree with Jon. Moving from Blogger to WordPress was a wonderful discovery after another.
That said, changing the template turned out to be a spagetti of php. Or at least it seems so at first glance – The WP guys did a good job with keeping the code maintainable, at least.
Jon: Take a look at K2, it looks promising as something to easily change your template from. I am still struggling with getting graphics, though :-/
Oh no, not K2.
WordPress themes are simple enough to create, and you can certainly do just about anything you could ever imagine with the platform, but there’s you some needless complexity. Not to mention you run the risk of it terribly breaking if you look at it funny.
(OK, I don’t like K2, and I didn’t like Kubrick before it.)
Okay, as I don’t really know much about WP and its themes, I would better listen than speak – What do you suggest then, Michael? Where can I learn?
I am eager to replace my standard, mundane theme. It’s horribly… Plain.
Aviad – yes it’s iWork 06. Only got it yesterday so I can’t say too much yet but it’s got some good new features but from what I can see they are not massive changes (so far) and I’m wondering if it was enough to justify a full upgrade of versions. Oh well.
Darren: That’s what I’m wondering as well. What interests me most is the right to left support, though. Seems like Apple forgot about the right to left writers of the world when they released iWork ’05, and I was hoping to see a change in ’06..
You woulnd’t know anything about it by chance, would you? :)
I havn’t seen anything in the instructions about this Aviad – must be frustrating!
Darren: It is. At the university I developed a sense to hearing Hebrew and writing translated English.
I could be a translator by doing a completely different degree. :)
I understand why people crack on Blogger. But not only is it free, but you can customize it much more than people realize. Granted, you have to have some technical ability to do so or know someone who can help you. But most people would never know that I am on Blogger except for the Blogspot address; I have categories and my template looks nothing like a Blogger template. And did I mention that it is FREE.
I have been using blogger.com for a couple years. In the last 6 months I may have logged in 2 times. I only post to my blogs with microsoft word – that eliminates all the problems with blogger. To change the template I use w.blogger. If I had to go back to logging in to post I wouldn’t be able to use blogger.com any more.
Darren, what happened to some of the votes? Last time I looked, Powerful Intentions Community vote was up to 28, and more people voted after that.
I had posted on one of our forums about your voting and people from our community were coming over here to vote. This is the thread here, with everyone saying they voted, and what the count was up to.
http://julieanne.powerfulintentions.com/forum/topic/7220
We were happy to be one of the top ten platforms out there. We’re a relatively new community.
This is what one of the founders of our community had posted on January 15 (American time)..
” WOW, PI is up to 27 votes after I voted!
YES! We’re number 5 of 48 Blogging services.
and only two behind Typepad.
Go PI!”
Regards from
Julieanne
Julieanne – that’s very odd.
Now you mention it I do remember PIntentions polling well but for some reason it didn’t end up with the votes. I’ll dig through the results again tonight – perhaps I accidentally hit ‘3’ instead of ’30’ when i was typing the results into keynote…
I’m out for the day today but will look into it tonight.
Thanks Darren. The “3” looks like the percentage maybe? We were all excited about being in the top 5 at one stage. We’re updating our platform soon, and the blogging section is one we looked at closely. It’s going to be great!
Gotta say I’m surprised that Blogger ranked so highly – I used it for about 2 months before I jumped ship and onto WP and have never looked back since.
Also, love the graph image, Darren – very spiffy (shame I’m not a Mac person)
I started with Blogger years ago, and have abandoned more blogs than I now run (3 soon to be 4). My personal blog is a WordPress blog (self-hosted) and I like it quite a bit, but Blogger’s simplicity and other aspects keep me coming back to it. IT’S DEAD EASY. Futzing with WP is often time-consuming and frustrating. Some of the best blogs use Blogger (bldg-blog and bubblegeneration).
I make money from my Blogger blogs and that’s where all the traffic is. You can use Blogger-hosted images in your template code with no problem. If you’re good with CSS, you’re all set. You can create excellent original Blogger template designs.
Blogger got me into Gmail and AdSense. And I trust Google’s servers way more than I trust the company hosting my WordPress blog. I think much of the splog problem stems more from the fact that Blogger is just the biggest free blog host platform with the most users and traffic. Nobody else even comes close in terms of numbers, so of course that’s where all the splogs are, too (Making AdSense easy to sign up for from Blogger helped with that, too).
I myself am a little surprised to be doing this in Blogger, but it works and it’s easy. And… you never know what they’re going to do with it next!
I originally used Radio. It was a leading blog provider and a pioneer, before, and it is a pity that they have not been able to maintain it.
I tried also Blogger and WordPress, and I must admit that WordPress is way more flexible for what I want to do.
I wonder what is the most advantage of WordPress comparing to Drupal.
[…] Darren at ProBlogger just published the results of a poll he recently ran. He asked, “What blog platform do you use most?” […]
Hi Darren, were you able to find out what happened with the results for Powerful Intentions Community?
I was wanting to post the results on our forum. to show people that Powerful Intentions was in the top 10. It was according to the results initially.
Regards from Julieanne
Go, Nucleus, go! :-P
I am a bit surprised about the fact that quite some pro-bloggers use WordPress.com because that service does not allow you to edit the template, or to put any scripting code in the posts. This means that it is impossible to use any form of advertising except ‘normal links’ in the posts. This doesn’t seem very appealing to me.
Because I am using Blogger.com for my blogs I am absolutely not surprised about the large number of users there. Blogger.com allows you to completely modify the template, and is compared to other blogging tools not lacking any important features (well, maybe the feature to notify commenters of future comments).
The beauty of the Blogger.com administration interface is its simplicity. It makes you focus on the posts and not fiddle around with plugins and other technical stuff all the time. It is also very easy to manage several blogs under one account, this is a feature that most other blogging tools are missing.
Of course the fact that it is completely free helps too. It is a matter of just setting up a blog, inserting the adsense code, and start making money :)
For me the fact that Blogger.com is owned by Google is a pro because I think this helps in the Google ranking of my Blogger.com blogs and also guarantees that they won’t all of a sudden start charging for their service (they have money enough…).
VoIP –
The ability of manipulate the Blogger templates is, in my opinion, it’s biggest plus. I have tweaked one of their templates to work with Chitika which puts an ad in each post that is key to the post topic. Unfortunately, the future of Chitika is questionable (if you believe all the “reports”).
BTW, I would be interested is corresponding with any Blogger users re. networking.
– Gary
My blog started out on a self-coded PHP-based platform that I eventually abandoned in favour of wordpress (I didn’t want to spend all the time writing in the features I wanted, so I ditched the project). I now use WordPress 1.5 for the blog, and keep a much more personal journal at LiveJournal. I used MT in the past, but found it to be rather limited, compared to WP. I’ve also used Blogger, but various issued with templates and logins made my shy away.
[…] Andrew says ProBloggers Use WordPress based on this poll at problogger.net which gives WordPress + WordPress.com about 40%. […]
[…] Which platform should I use? With the tools available you could set up your new blog and be operational within 10 minutes of reading this post. It wouldn’t need to cost you a penny, and there won’t be any adverts on your site – unless you want to sell something! Even if you decide to go for one of the premium service options, we are talking a few pounds, euros, dollars a month. The technology is easy to set up, the online editors for your content work well, and it’s reasonably straightforward to syndicate your content to the world with RSS. For the small or medium business, this is a low cost, low risk exercise to add the concept to your marketing mix, and to start having an online conversation with your market and customers. There are perfectly acceptable free services available like Blogger (owned by Google) or WordPress.com. These are a good place to start. Blogger gives you all of the basic features you’ll need, gives you a fair choice of template styles and allows you access to the template code itself. This means that with a little care and very modest knowledge of HTML you can customise your site’s look and feel, to add links, add feeds, add skype buttons, add almost anything. Most of the useful utilities you can subscribe to provide you with the HTML to copy, and guidance on where to paste it in the template. WordPress.com gives you a good range of styles and templates, and is nicely configurable, but does not allow access to the template. So you are restricted in terms of look and feel and placing extra features and plug-ins, but it does have the concept of pages, as well as posts. You can set up as many pages in a hierarchy as you need, just like a Content Management System. This makes it easy for you to describe your business in as much detail as you need, alongside your regular blog posts. Either of these will work well. The next level up is a product like TypePad, from Six Apart. Their pricing is from $5 to $15 a month, depending on how many blogs and authors you want to be involved, or to get extra features like photo albums. This offers a good range of features, templates and configuration, as well as access to the templates to add in those extra goodies. The next option is to download blogging software yourself, so that you can take control of the templates and style and get the look and feel you really want. You could choose a commercial option like Moveable Type (MT), which is actually the software used by the TypePad service, or an open source (free) offering like WordPress.org (WP), which is the software used by WordPress.com. MT’s pricing starts at $70 for a basic personal option, right up to $1,300 for a commercial licence for 50 users. WordPress just costs you the time and effort to download and install it. In both cases you’ll need to budget for hosting the software. However, there are options for either WP or MT with Yahoo! Small Business, where you can rent appropriate server space with the capacity and bandwidth you need, and have either product installed and kept up to date for you. Here is a good blog software comparison chart, (UPDATE: please note, Dennis Howlett tells me most of the no’s for WP on this chart can actually be done with available plug-ins) and the accompanying article by Susannah Gardner which asks “Are you using the right blogging tool?“. MT and WP are discussed in some detail by Vinnie Garcia in “Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed“. A recent poll of about a 1000 readers of problogger showed the following spread of platforms – 37% WordPress.org, 22% Blogger, 8% Movable Type, 4% Expression Engine, 3.5% TypePad, 3% WordPress.com and 49 different platforms in the survey. There seems to be a phenomenon that bloggers start with something simple like Blogger or TypePad, but then after 3 to 6 months they feel the restrictions, and move up to something better. Stuart Jones recently moved his BusinessMatters blog from Blogger to TypePad. Dennis Howlett started on TypePad, but recently moved his AccMan Pro blog to WP. I’m about to move BTZ from Blogger to WP. The good news is that migration appears to be straightforward, with guidance available from platform to platform. Both Stuart and Dennis have good experiences in their transition, and that seems to be the norm. I hope so, but I’ll tell you more on that once I’ve lived through it. These products make it very easy for any business to get a web presence. I’ve noticed a number of companies recently setting up a blog site, and not bothering with a traditional website, for example GlobalBrain. Last night on the drive home I thought about my own accountant, who has an embarrassing holding page for her website, awaiting her technically minded husband to find time to finish the job. While I was thinking about this article it occurred to me that she could set up a WordPress.com account, start a blog, but use the tabs and pages to get some web presence explaining what she does. She had set something up within 30 minutes of my call. I won’t point you to it until she’s got some sensible content written, but it shows the power and ease of this medium. The next in the series is Part 4 , which give you some ideas on how to start, things you must do to help make your site a success, mistakes to avoid, and some important words on the topic of Search Engine Optimization. If you missed them, here is where you find Part 1 and Part 2. Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, RSS, Blogger, WordPress, Google, TypePad, SixApart, MovableType, Yahoo!, BusinessMatters, AccManPro, GlobalBrain Powered By Qumana […]
[…] […]
[…] According to one of ProBlogger.net’s previous posts WordPress is on the top, when it comes to select a blogging software. Here is the top 6 softwares Darren tracked: […]
[…] https://problogger.com/blog-platforms-poll-results/ […]
As I am not too good with scripting with css or php for wordpress, I am currently looking for someone to code a template I’ve created with photoshop to be compliant with wordpress. I am not too good with wordpress template tags and such forth and so I would rather have one of you help me with it. If anyone of you could provide me with some insight to how I could get this done I would appreciate it.
P.S I do know how to use html but never got into css for some reason
[…] 在Problogger上的链接在这里 https://problogger.com/blog-platforms-poll-results/ […]
WordPress rules all way long
i really like the unlimited options this software has
[…] Pro Blogger Platform Survey 1000 survey respondents list their blogging platform showing WordPress the clear leader at 37% (January 18, 2006) […]
[…] Pro Blogger Platform Survey 1000 survey respondents list their blogging platform showing WordPress the clear leader at 37% (January 18, 2006) […]