Yesterday, the number of self-hosted and WordPress.com blogs passed the 50 million mark. WordPress keeps a counter on its wordpress.com/stats website, keeping track of the number of WordPress installations on its own servers as well as self-hosted blogs.

The milestone was confirmed by WordPress' Andrew Nacin, who posted the following message on his Twitter account (via The Next Web): "Total WordPress sites just passed *50 million* today! https://t.co/PoXxrF5 #wcmtl."

Over 283 million people view more than 2.5 billion pages each month on WordPress.com. Furthermore, WordPress.com users produce about 500,000 new posts and 400,000 new comments on an average day.

WordPress blogs are written in over 120 languages. The breakdown below shows the top 10 languages:

  1. English: (66 percent)
  2. Spanish: (8.7 percent)
  3. Portuguese: (6.5 percent)
  4. Indonesian: (3.5 percent)
  5. Italian: (2 percent)
  6. German: (1.8 percent)
  7. French: (1.4 percent)
  8. Russian: (1.1 percent)
  9. Vietnamese: (1.1 percent)
  10. Swedish: (1.0 percent)

Given that the English language accounts for the two-thirds of all written posts, WordPress has a huge opportunity to expand internationally. English may be the most spoken and written language in the world, but it certainly does not dominate as much as it does on WordPress. It's surprising that Spanish and Portuguese (second and third, respectively) are so far behind, not to mention that French, which is the second biggest language in the world, is only seventh. Maybe WordPress should focus on improving its language support, or at least advertising in more languages.

Earlier this month, WordPress.org announced the availability of WordPress 3.2 (codenamed Gershwin), the fifteenth major release of the open source publishing platform. The focus for the 3.2 release was to make WordPress faster and lighter.