WordPress is celebrating it’s eighth year since it was conceived and brought into existence by Matt Mullenweg and co-founder Mike Little. Originally forked from it’s predecessor which was called b2; WordPress has grown from being a blogging engine for a niche crowd to one of the most widely used content management systems on the web.

This site has been created to document some of the most interesting news and statistics for WordPress and it’s ecosystem. You can also catch Matt Mullenweg’s yearly address entitled State of the Word 2011 at the bottom of this page.

WordPress Statistics 2011

• 14.7% of the top million websites use WordPress
• In every 100 new websites started 22 run WordPress
• The average hourly rate for working with WordPress is $50
• WordPress has over 15,000 plugins available online
• There have been over 200 million plugin downloads

State of The Word 2011

You can view the raw slides for the SOTW 2011 Presentation here.