Ultimate team-up: Federated Media and Automattic partnership brings ads to WordPress.com

Leading digital advertising company Federated Media and WordPress developer Automattic forged a strategic partnership today that allows for greater interaction between advertisers and audiences from over 24 million blogs hosted by WordPress.com.

The partnership, which was announced during the Web 2.0 Summit event in San Francisco, Calif., gives WordPress.com blog owners the ability to place advertisements on their sites. In turn, advertisers on Federated Media’s network gain the ability to target their ads by matching … Continue Reading

Pantheon launches Drupal-based cloud site management for enterprises

Pantheon, a content management service provider for enterprises, has officially launched out of beta and is now focused on helping customers move their site management tools completely to the cloud.

“Pantheon gives you enterprise-class tools with the ease of a consumer site like Twitter or Tumblr.” Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen told VentureBeat. “It runs fast, it’s always on and there’s no need to buy servers or hire IT for content management and hosting.”

Pantheon offers … Continue Reading

WordPress runs 15 percent of the web’s highest trafficked sites

Online publishing software company WordPress released some incredible growth statistics Friday, including that WordPress is running on top of 14.7 percent of the world’s top one million websites. Almost equally astounding is that 22 of 100 new active domains are running on WordPress.

One year ago, WordPress was used by 8.5 percent of the world’s top million sites, so it’s astounding how many domains are using it now. In July, WordPress-based sites passed the 50 … Continue Reading

Blog company Automattic has a massive audience, less-massive revenue

Executives from Automattic, the company behind blogging service WordPress, recently took the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris, where they shared some details about how the company is doing, as recounted in TechCrunch. The big takeaway: Automattic has signed up a long list of publishers who reach a huge audience, but it hasn’t succeeded in turning that into equally an impressive source of revenue.

Specifically, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and chief executive Toni … Continue Reading

How Microsoft went from 30 million Windows Live bloggers to 300,000

The popularity of Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces blogs appears to have been greatly exaggerated.

Microsoft announced a few days ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that it will be moving its 7 million active Windows Live Spaces blogs to Automattic’s WordPress blogging platform. But now that number seems closer to 300,000 blogs — according to internal emails from Microsoft executives obtained by Betanews.

At first, Betanews’s Joe Wilcox assumed that the 300,000 blogs would come … Continue Reading

WordPress problem: Hackers break into Robert Scoble’s blog, delete posts

Uber blogger Robert Scoble said today that hackers broke into his blog and deleted about two months’ worth of postings — leading to findings that there are security problems with the blogging software he uses, WordPress.

WordPress, a very successful blogging software that VentureBeat also uses, can be used on any server, but it is more vulnerable when used on servers not owned by WordPress itself. Scoble had moved away from WordPress’ servers (which is … Continue Reading