WordPress powers 14.7 percent of top million sites worldwide

WordPress continues to prove itself as a considerable force on an international level when it comes to website building.

Based on the company's first ever user and developer survey, the blogging tool has been found to power 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world. Apparently that is up 8.5 percent, at least according to WordPress and some other kind of internal statistics if this is really the company's first user survey.

To get a better idea of where WordPress has a presence and just how crowded that region might be, look at the cluster of pinpoints on the map of survey respondents below:

As for the United States, WordPress is used to power 22 out of every 100 new active domains.

So why has WordPress become such a popular tool worldwide? Well, it's not that hard to figure out. There are at least two easy reasons: it's easy to use and it's cheap -- even free for those who don't buy a domain name.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg explained on his company's official blog:

We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 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, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. (If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.)

Mullenweg added, likely in jest, that there is still "85.3 [percent] of the web that needs help."

The survey was based on more than 18,000 responses.