Following on my post yesterday about choosing a blogging platform for small and medium businesses, Catherine Winters asked if I had any market share data about the different platforms. Good question. So I did a little searching and Señor Google did have a few interesting things to say ...
First, I liked this piece by Pingdom on the blogging platform of choice for the Top 100 blogs. About 2/3 of them use a self-hosted service - so those aren't really relevant. But a 1/3 or so use a hosted platform and it was interesting to see those results.
I liked the Pingdom piece (even if the data is from Jan 2009) because it included only "real" blogs - there are a lot of spam blogs out there. This is what concerns me a little about the report from BuiltWith (a site I totally didn't know about that tracks technology changes and trends). It looks at the whole universe of blogs and I feel fairly certain that a large number of them are spam.
Wordpress is certainly the most popular - especially in articles about which blogging platforms are the most popular :) There are a lot of those articles out there. This one from Fuel Your Writing was the best written one I found. While he doesn't quote market share stats, David selected four platforms that he was familiar with (Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous) and shared his well-thought-out pros and cons. I only wish he would have included Typepad since it would have rounded out my recommendation list nicely.
David comes to one of the same conclusions that I did - you need to choose your platform based on your needs - which is why I was trying not to focus on "feature set" in my blogging platform recommendations, but on other "meta" issues around blogging.
Oh ... here's the other neat piece I discovered. ProBlogger has done a survey of the blogging platforms used by his readers for the last few years. Great data - again, Wordpress on top. What I was delighted to discover what this companion piece by Jon Peltier where he uses ProBlogger's data to improve the graphs used to visualize the data. If you're interested at all in data visualizations and how to use graphs to improve your content, read Peltier's piece - I love how step-by-step and clear it is.
And I'm still looking for any "meta" criteria (vs features) that you would add to my list when choosing a blogging platform.