Blogging spans large publishing platforms, active reader communities, specialized topics, and increasingly AI-assisted workflows. The statistics below combine platform measurements from July 2013, WordPress usage data measured on September 29, 2026, and Orbit Media’s 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers. Dates and source populations matter: these figures describe specific services or surveys, rather than every blogger worldwide.
Contents
- Blog publishing scale and output
- Blog reader reach and mobile access
- Blogging community interaction
- Topics, embeds, and media formats
- WordPress’s footprint for bloggers
- Workflow, results, and AI adoption
Blog publishing scale and output
WordPress.com’s July 2013 figures show the scale a major publishing platform could reach in a single month. Users started 1,204,432 new blogs, an average of 38,853 new blogs per day. During the same period, they published 47,231,836 posts and wrote 11,549,273,687 words.
Those totals describe both the volume and the labor behind blogging. WordPress.com reported production of 133,672 words per minute in July 2013. Its publishing total represented 7,537,707,792,351,330 bytes of data. The platform’s posts received 4,000,863,171 pageviews during the month, giving the publishing activity a substantial measured audience.
The route to publication was not limited to a desktop editor. WordPress.com users published 599,340 posts by email in July 2013. They also published 261 posts by voice. These figures are historical platform measurements, not current estimates, but they show that bloggers were already using multiple input methods at that point.
| July 2013 WordPress.com measure | Reported figure |
|---|---|
| New blogs started | 1,204,432 |
| New blogs per day, average | 38,853 |
| Posts published | 47,231,836 |
| Words written | 11,549,273,687 |
| Pageviews | 4,000,863,171 |
| Posts published by email | 599,340 |
| Posts published by voice | 261 |
Source: WordPress.com by the Numbers: The July 2013 Hot List (July 2013). The source reports these platform totals for that month; they should not be read as a current global blogging forecast.
Blog reader reach and mobile access
The same July 2013 WordPress.com report recorded 1,259,096,024 page accesses with a mobile device. That mobile total included 279,579,298 iPhone pageviews and 3,756,390 Windows 8 phone pageviews. The device categories reflect the reporting period, so they are best understood as a snapshot of mobile readership at that time.
Readers were also distributed across a very broad set of interests. WordPress.com readers followed 259,402 different topics during July 2013. For bloggers, that breadth is a reminder that “blog audience” is not one uniform group: readers can gather around large public subjects, narrow hobbies, current events, or highly specific communities.
The platform’s pageview and topic figures also show why access and discovery belong together. A blog can publish at scale, but the reader experience includes device choice and topic navigation. In the July 2013 WordPress.com measurement, mobile access was already recorded separately at billion-pageview scale, while topic following extended into hundreds of thousands of distinct subjects.
Source: WordPress.com by the Numbers: The July 2013 Hot List (July 2013). These are WordPress.com platform measurements, not an estimate of all mobile blog reading.
Blogging community interaction
Blogging is also a participation system. WordPress.com users left 68,696,188 comments on one another’s blogs during July 2013. The busiest commenting day produced 2,360,990 comments. Those figures capture direct discussion, while other interaction signals show readers responding through platform actions and social sharing.
During the month, WordPress.com users gave one another 7,501,667 Likes. They shared one another’s posts to Facebook 3,072,294 times. The platform also removed 134,109,468 spam comments. That contrast matters: visible discussion activity existed alongside a much larger moderation burden, and raw comment counts should not be treated as equivalent to meaningful conversation.
Community support was another measurable layer. WordPress.com support engineers left 22,429 replies in the support forums during July 2013. Staff highlighted 225 bloggers on Freshly Pressed, generating 52,942 clicks. Discovery, technical help, comments, Likes, and sharing all formed part of the platform’s blogging ecosystem.
For a blogger, these figures suggest several distinct ways a post can perform. A post may receive comments, Likes, or Facebook shares; a blogger may be discovered through editorial highlighting; and a user may need support to keep publishing. None of these measures alone represents total influence, and the source does not provide a universal conversion between them.
Source: WordPress.com by the Numbers: The July 2013 Hot List (July 2013).
Topics, embeds, and media formats
The July 2013 WordPress.com data includes both mainstream subjects and very small niches. Users published 23,969,983 posts about politics and 8,357,758 posts about cars. They published 645,633 posts about Iraq, 875 posts about Daft Punk, and 19 posts about spelunking.
These topic counts are not a ranking of topic quality or commercial value. They are evidence of the range of subjects represented in the platform’s reporting. A large topic can support high publishing volume, while a narrow topic can still have a defined community even when its measured post count is small.
Blog posts also incorporated material from outside services. WordPress.com bloggers embedded 187,660,662 files during July 2013. The reported examples included 13,487,683 Flickr images, 9,779,082 YouTube videos, and 56,699 SlideShare presentations. Music appeared through 19,012 Bandcamp files.
On-page additions included 145,597 Text Widgets and 3,141 Box.net Widgets. Together, these measurements show a mixed publishing format: written posts could be supplemented with images, video, presentations, music, widgets, and other files. The figures count reported embeds or additions, not unique bloggers or the engagement generated by each format.
Source: WordPress.com by the Numbers: The July 2013 Hot List (July 2013).
WordPress’s footprint for bloggers
W3Techs measured WordPress on September 29, 2026 and reported that it powered 58.7% of websites whose content management system it could identify. Across all websites measured by W3Techs, WordPress powered 40.2%. These are website-technology measurements, not counts of individual blogs or bloggers.
The same source reported a concentrated version footprint among websites running WordPress. WordPress version 7 was used by 63.5% of those websites, version 6 by 29.4%, version 5 by 4.8%, version 4 by 2.0%, and version 3 by 0.2%.
| WordPress measure | Share reported by W3Techs |
|---|---|
| WordPress among identifiable CMS websites | 58.7% |
| WordPress among all measured websites | 40.2% |
| Version 7 among WordPress websites | 63.5% |
| Version 6 among WordPress websites | 29.4% |
| Version 5 among WordPress websites | 4.8% |
| Version 4 among WordPress websites | 2.0% |
| Version 3 among WordPress websites | 0.2% |
WordPress’s surrounding tools also appear in the W3Techs measurements. Elementor was used by 31.5% of websites running WordPress, WooCommerce by 19.8%, WPBakery by 7.4%, and Beaver Builder by 1.0%. Gallery and community tools had smaller reported shares: 10Web Photo Gallery at 0.6%, NextGEN Gallery at 0.5%, Oxygen at 0.4%, Bricks at 0.4%, bbPress at 0.2%, and BuddyPress at 0.1%. W3Techs grouped 36.1% of WordPress subtechnology usage into “Other.”
Source: Usage Statistics and Market Share of WordPress, September 2026, measured September 29, 2026. The source’s denominator and technology categories should be kept in mind when comparing these shares.
Workflow, results, and AI adoption
Orbit Media’s 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers provides a more recent view of blogging work. The average blog post was 1,312 words in 2026. Orbit’s trend data records a peak average length of 1,427 words in 2023. These are survey and trend measures, not a rule for the ideal length of every post.
The average time to write a blog post was 3 hours 20 minutes in 2026. Orbit Media’s analysis also reported that the average content marketer spent 50 fewer hours writing than in 2022, based on 57 posts per year and a 50-minute reduction per post in the 2026 analysis. The reported change describes the analysis’s stated comparison and assumptions.
Results were unevenly understood by respondents. In the 2026 survey, 13.9% of surveyed marketers reported strong blog results, while 18.9% said they did not know whether their blog delivered results. These percentages describe respondents’ reported outcomes and confidence, not an independently verified performance benchmark.
AI adoption was widespread in the same survey: 92.4% of surveyed marketers said they used AI for blogging in 2026. That statistic identifies reported use, not the share of text generated by AI or the quality of the resulting content.
The survey also recorded a change in influencer collaboration. The share of marketers using influencer collaboration fell from 25% in 2017 to 7% in the 2026 Orbit Media survey. Yet marketers using influencer collaboration were 2.6 times as likely to report strong results as the benchmark group in the 2026 data. The comparison is an association reported by the survey, not proof that collaboration alone caused stronger results.
Source: Blogging Statistics 2026: What 1,042 Content Marketers Told Us About What Works (2026 survey, with trend comparisons identified above).