10 years of WordPress.com: 2.5B blog posts in 137 languages and 3B comments

As the Internet’s most popular blogging platform, WordPress.com needs little introduction. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the blog-building / Web-hosting service owned and operated by Automattic. And today, in the same week founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg celebrated 10 years since the company’s first hire, Automattic has revealed some interesting numbers covering a decade of WordPress.com blogging.

According to a blog post published by Automattic, in the past 10 years, a total of 137 languages have been used across 2.5 billion posts written with WordPress.com.

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Feeding into those 2.5 billion posts are more than 3 billion comments, while the longest title ever to appear on a WordPress.com blog containing 19,176 words. The longest post itself consisted of a staggering 10 million words — we don’t envy the copy editor on that one.

It’s also worth clearing up an oft-confused tidbit surrounding the WordPress brand. Operated by the not-for-profit WordPress Foundation, “WordPress” is actually the name of the unhosted open-source blogging tool created by Mullenweg and Mike Little — you download software and associated templates to your computer, find your own host, and you’re good to go.

After unleashing WordPress on the world’s blogging community in 2003, Mullenweg founded Automattic — a fully private corporation — and opened WordPress.com in August 2005. WordPress.com is itself powered by the WordPress software. Today, 24 percent of all websites are either hosted on WordPress.com or use the WordPress open-source software.

You may also not know that Automattic is the company behind a ton of related blogging tools, such as spam-filtering service Akismet, avatar-hosting service Gravatar, survey and polling tool PollDaddy, and note-taking synchronization service Simplenote.

In May last year, Automattic raised its biggest-ever funding round — the $160 million deal valued the company at more than $1 billion. But as owner of the Web’s most recognizable self-publishing brand, that seems like chump change.