WordPress increases its domination of the top 100 blogs

WordPress is strengthening its position as the dominating blogging platform or Content Management System (CMS) used by the world’s top 100 blogs. This year, WordPress is used by 52% of the top blogs, up from the 48% we identified in our study in 2012.

With over 65 million WordPress sites in the world, it’s clear that Automattic’s platform is popular. But let’s have a look at the entire top 100.

WordPress keeps on gaining in popularity

We grabbed the list of the top 100 blogs in the world from Technorati and tried to identify which blogging platform or CMS the site is using. Out of the 100 blogs, we could identify and verify the platform in use by 94 of the sites. For the other 6, we could not ourselves confirm the platform, nor did we get any replies from the sites when reaching out to them. You can read more about our methodology at the end of the article.

Here is the result of our 2013 study of the blogging platforms used by the top 100 blogs:

You can also download a larger version of this chart.

Comparing 2013 and 2012

Here are a few comments about what’s happened since our last study in 2012:

• In total, WordPress has increased from 48 to 52 out of the top 100 blogs.

• TypePad has increased somewhat, from 2 to 4 sites.

• Movable Type has decreased from 7 to 4 sites.

• Drupal dropped 1 site.

• Tumblr stays on the list with 1 site after making its entrance on the top 100 last year.

• CrowdFusion stays on the list with 1 site. It has since last year changed name to Ceros.

• Scoop was on the list last year, used by DailyKos.com. It may be that DailyKos is still using Scoop, but we could not verify this, therefore the site is now included in the N/A category.

• Among the switches during the year we noted that Mashable has moved from WordPress to Custom, and Twitter switched to Drupal from Blogger.

• Neatorama appears to be running a combination of Varo and WordPress, so we put it in the Custom category.

• Google’s Blogger gained a site and is now up to 3.

• The 6 sites marked as “N/A” we didn’t manage to get any information about. Even after repeatedly reaching out to the site owners and admins, we were unable to get any replies.

• It’s very likely that a big chunk of the “N/A” sites are, in fact, Custom, and if we add the two categories together, that’s 19% of the top 100 list.

• Last year we differentiated between hosted and self-hosted WordPress. This year, to simplify matters, we put all WordPress in one category.

And here are the aggregated results, including a comparison to 2012:

The blog platforms of the top 100 blogs – comparing 2012 and 2013

Platform
2012
2013

WordPress
48
52

Custom
14
12

Drupal
8
7

N/A
8
6

Gawker
5
5

BlogSmith
4
4

Movable Type
7
4

TypePad
2
4

Blogger
2
3

Ceros
1
1

Joomla
0
1

Tumblr
1
1

Complete list: top 100 blogs and their blog platforms

Here is the complete list of the top 100 blogs, presented in order of Technorati rank:

Top 100 blogs and their blog platforms – complete list

Technorati ranking
Site
Platform

1
www.huffingtonpost.com
Movable Type

2
www.tmz.com
Ceros

3
mashable.com
WordPress

4
www.techcrunch.com
WordPress

5
www.gothamist.com
Movable Type

6
www.mediaite.com
WordPress

7
www.theverge.com
Custom

8
www.gawker.com
Gawker

9
arstechnica.com
WordPress

10
www.buzzfeed.com
Custom

11
jezebel.com
Gawker

12
www.gizmodo.com
Gawker

13
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
WordPress

14
www.infowars.com
WordPress

15
laughingsquid.com
WordPress

16
theonion.com
Custom

17
www.theblaze.com
WordPress

18
hotair.com
WordPress

19
www.joystiq.com
Blogsmith

20
www.zerohedge.com
Drupal

21
www.scotusblog.com
WordPress

22
www.engadget.com
Blogsmith

23
googleblog.blogspot.com
Blogger

24
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
WordPress

25
www.eurogamer.net
N/A

26
www.deadline.com
WordPress

27
politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com
WordPress

28
www.boingboing.net
WordPress

29
thenextweb.com
WordPress

30
www.deadspin.com
Gawker

31
9to5mac.com
WordPress

32
funnyordie.com
N/A

33
www.towleroad.com
TypePad

34
www.wired.com/wiredscience
WordPress

35
www.neatorama.com
Custom

36
www.neowin.net
Custom

37
www.businessinsider.com
Custom

38
www.macrumors.com
WordPress

39
www.slashgear.com
WordPress

40
thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com
WordPress

41
americanthinker.com
Movable Type

42
www.redstate.com
WordPress

43
bleacherreport.com
Custom

44
mlbtraderumors.com
TypePad

45
www.sbnation.com
Custom

46
artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
WordPress

47
thisisnthappiness.com
Tumblr

48
marginalrevolution.com
WordPress

49
ycorpblog.com
N/A

50
blog.us.playstation.com
WordPress

51
blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/
WordPress

52
www.extremetech.com
WordPress

53
www.dailykos.com
N/A

54
townhall.com
Custom

55
www.wired.com/threatlevel
WordPress

56
eurekalert.org
Custom

57
www.tor.com
Joomla

58
americablog.com
WordPress

59
sethgodin.typepad.com
TypePad

60
www.whitehouse.gov/blog
Drupal

61
www.autoblog.com
Blogsmith

62
thebiglead.com
WordPress

63
joemygod.blogspot.com
Blogger

64
www.refinery29.com
N/A

65
flavorwire.com
WordPress

66
www.lifehacker.com
Gawker

67
blog.twitter.com
Drupal

68
rightwingwatch.org
Drupal

69
www.tuaw.com
BlogSmith

70
thisiscolossal.com
WordPress

71
www.dlisted.com
Drupal

72
www.comicbookmovie.com
Custom

73
inquisitr.com
WordPress

74
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
WordPress

75
www.geekologie.com
N/A

76
www.geekosystem.com
WordPress

77
thelede.blogs.nytimes.com
WordPress

78
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
WordPress

79
directorblue.blogspot.com
Blogger

80
www.bleedingcool.com
WordPress

81
www.bostonherald.com/sports
Drupal

82
www.kottke.org
Movable Type

83
economistsviews.typepad.com
TypePad

84
blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/
WordPress

85
consequenceofsound.net
WordPress

86
www.cinemablend.com
Custom

87
www.wired.com/dangerroom
WordPress

88
wattsupwiththat.com
WordPress

89
www.geek.com
WordPress

90
consumerist.com
WordPress

91
www.popsugar.com
Drupal

92
www.celebitchy.com
WordPress

93
trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com
WordPress

94
www.siliconera.com
WordPress

95
www.nakedcapitalism.com
WordPress

96
www.mediabistro.com/galleycat
WordPress

97
www.ubergizmo.com
WordPress

98
hip2save.com
WordPress

99
animalnewyork.com
WordPress

100
phandroid.com
WordPress

Blogging’s future

We’d like to send a big thank you to everyone that helped us out with this article. You are too many to mention, but we truly appreciate your help.

There’s no denying that blogging has changed in the last few years, especially with the arrival of social media like Facebook and Twitter. For many of us, what we used to blog about we now publish to social networks.

But there’s also no denying that blogging is not gone. It has, however, changed as has the tools used to publish blogs with. Some, like WordPress, started out as blogging platforms and has taken on more general content management functionality. Others have developed in the opposite direction. Even though we believe it will be increasingly hard to distinguish what is a blogging platform we are certainly interested in following the developments. Therefore, we already look forward to doing the same study next year again.

Which platform do you use and why? Let us know in the comments below.

Methodology: Since the Technorati Top 100 is updated every day, we froze our list on March 20, 2013, and then set out to investigate what blogging platform or CMS each site is using. For each site, we started by using third-party services like BuiltWith and Wappalyzer, to see if they would reveal anything about the site. If that did not give us any results, we proceeded with tools like host, whois, and dig. Only if that still didn’t tell us what we needed, did we get in touch with the site through contact details published. Out of the 100 sites we were unable to get confirmation for 6 sites.