Over 20% of new active domains run WordPress

The long-form blogging platform boasts some serious clout, in the face of the Twitters and Tumblrs

WordPress announced Friday that its open source blogging platform now powers 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5 percent. Astonishingly, the company found that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

The company also shared a few statistics from its first-ever user and developer survey, in which over 18,000 respondents participated. (Any data researcher that wants to unearth more delicious tidbits from the survey is welcome to download the raw information here.)

According to the survey, 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50.

“In tough economic times,” writes WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, “it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs.”

Mullenweg recently presented some fascinating data from the survey at WordCamp San Francisco 2011 (WCSF), the official annual conference of the WordPress open source project.

WordPress 3.2, code-named “Gershwin” and released on July 4, was downloaded 500,000 times in its first two days, which Mullenweg calls the “fastest upgrade velocity ever.” (As far as I know, Firefox 3.0 still holds the record for most software downloads in 24 hours: eight million.) The WordPress platform is expanding in all manners, as it now has over 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads.

In tune with WordPress’ massive growth, WCSF hosted more than 1,000 attendees with many more watching the livestream, making it the biggest year yet for the conference.

You can learn more about WordPress and its growing influence across the Web by watching the video below, featuring Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” address.