What are the Most Popular Platforms among Top Bloggers?

I use Blogger for all my blog hosting needs. I have heard that there are some other blogging platforms, and the most competitive to our Blogger is, definitely, WordPress. I even reviewed the differences in one of my posts, but overall for me the blogging world was divided between two ruling blogging platforms with small fractions of all others, having a limited, mostly local, influence, like Live Journal in Russia. Maybe, it is the same for you? But also maybe it is time to at least consider more professional solution?

Pingdom performed a very interesting research of which platforms are chosen by the top 100 blogs according to the Technorati rating. Note that there is a notable distinction between blogging services and self-hosted blog software.

• Blogging services are online services like Typepad, Wordpress.com and Blogger, where a third-party is handling the blog software and hosting for you.
• Blog software is the software you use when you set up and host the platform yourself (using Wordpress, Movable Type, etc).

Review the diagram so you can get a quick overview of which blog platforms (and CMS) are the most popular among the top 100 blogs.

Blog software (self-hosted)

As you see Wordpress is the most-used platform among self-hosted blogs, which perhaps isn’t a huge surprise. It has more than twice as many blogs in the top 100 as Movable Type, the blog platform that came in second place.

• Wordpress is used by 27 blogs in the top 100.
• Movable Type is used by 12 blogs in the top 100.
• Only 8 of the top 100 blogs use a custom-made blog platform.
• Drupal is the only general-purpose CMS with any presence worth mentioning, with 4 blogs in the top 100.

Blogging services

Though Wordpress is more popular among the self-hosted blogs than Movable Type, the situation is reversed when it comes to the blogging services based on these blog platforms. Typepad (based on Movable Type) is more popular than Wordpress.com (based on Wordpress). Blogger comes in at third place.

That’s at least if you count the commonly available blogging services. If you also count the AOL-owned Blogsmith that is used by Weblogs, Inc., that ends up having almost as many blogs in the top 100 as Typepad, leaving Wordpress.com and Blogger in a distant third and fourth place.

Traditional media like Entertainment Weekly, CNN and Wired often use blogging services for their blogs, and most seem to have chosen Typepad.

• More than one third of the top 100 blogs use a blogging service.
• Typepad is used by 16 blogs in the top 100.
• Blogsmith is used by 14 blogs in the top 100.
• Wordpress.com is used by 5 blogs in the top 100.
• Blogger is used by 3 blogs in the top 100. (Including, of course, The Official Google Blog.)

Wordpress and Movable Type as a whole

If you combine the hosted and self-hosted versions of Wordpress and Movable Type (i.e. include Wordpress.com and Typepad as well), they dominate, claiming 60 of the top 100 blogs.

• Wordpress + Wordpress.com have 32 of the top 100 blogs
• Movable Type + Typepad have 28 of the top 100 blogs.

Blog networks

Interesting is that two big blog networks have taken a large chunk of the top 100 blogs. In addition to these, Wired has created a small blog empire of its own.

• AOL-owned Weblogs, Inc. has 14 blogs in the top 100. All use Blogsmith as a blog platform.
• Gawker Media has 8 blogs in the top 100. Gawker Media uses its own, custom-made blog platform for its blogs.
• Wired’s blogs are plentiful as well. There are 9 Wired blogs in the top 100, all using Typepad.