Compass Designs

A while ago I blogged about comparing the popularity of Drupal to Joomla, both in terms of traffic and searches. I have also been talking recently about how Joomla is becoming better suited as a blogging platform. Just today, I was messing around with Vince Wools trying to make a Joomla permalink mambot.

With my mind on blogging with Joomla right now, I thought I would compare the top platforms to Joomla and see if I could spot some new trends in the competition.

First I used Alexa, this measures traffic rank to a domain.

Here we can see that the 800 lb gorilla here is blogger.com. Not surprising as its free and has the smallest learning curve, which means that lots of people are going to be using it. Also as all the blogs use the same domain, we are looking at the sum of all blogger blog traffic.

Let's take that one off and see what we have.

Now the leader of the pack seems to be typepad. But here again, its not such a fair comparison. Many Typepad blogs run on the typepad.com domain, so their traffic gets included in these statistics. Interestingly, if you add wordpress.com to the comparison (the domain of wordpress hosting blogs) you see that it approaches typepad.com. Perhaps we can conclude then that Joomla is approaching Wordpress in people trying to find out about the platform (visiting their sites), but we can't say much about typepad and blogger because of the domain issue.

Let's try and parse these statistics a little more. By using the "link" command, we can see how many sites are linking to the project site. Assuming that a relatively equal proportion of webmasters will proudly show a link back to the project site, we can check on yahoo:

Links to wordpress.org = 5,641,253

Links to joomla.org = 5,578,628

Now its getting more interesting. is Joomla starting to overtake Wordpress? 

OK, so perhaps the Alexa comparison is not very useful. If you have a Joomla blog, then you are going to be on your own domain and so your traffic won't be appearing in this graph.

On to the search trends analysis, and here the results are fascinating.

Here we can see that there are many more people search for Joomla than any of the other three platforms, and not only that, Joomla's gain has been a surge in the last 12 months. Its also worth noticing that there are hardly any mainstream news stories (teh second graph) for Joomla compared to the "big" three.

OK, so I'll admit, in a previous life I used to teach high school math and have a unhealthy interest in statistics, but can we draw any other conclusions form this?

One obvious one is that Joomla is only a year old, and in that short time it has take a big bite out of the other blog platform's market share. Secondly, I might guess that Joomla is in stealth mode right now. It doesn't seem to have the mainstream news media coverage of the other three (ask a random person what these four names are and they will connect the first three to blogs I would suspect). Despite this, it has still crept up on Wordpress and by a very rough estimate has the same amount of site installations.

My prediction is that with Joomla 1.5 we will see the release of much more robust blogging tools for Joomla, and with some of the mainstream news coverage that goes along with that, see an even bigger increase in its use.

I got my pom poms ready.....