WordPress.com growing fast. Over 6 million new blogs in 2010, pageviews up 53%

Automattic‘s WordPress.com, the commercially run leg of the popular blogging platform is growing incredibly fast, according to its latest statistics.

Automattic tells us that it has seen over 6 million new blogs sign up in the past year and that total pageviews for the year stood at 23 billion, up an impressive 53% from 2009. Media uploads also doubled to 94.5 terabytes of new photos and videos, while new posts were up 110% to 146 million.

Meanwhile, mobile WordPress blogging is on the up. The company’s userbase for its mobile apps increased 700% to 1.4 million in 2010.

We got in touch with Automattic after Royal Pingdom picked up on stats published in late December that revealed that the WordPress.com now accounts for half of all WordPress blogs around the world. The other half, of course, consists of self-hosted WordPress.org installations.

As we reported 11 months ago when the hosted blogging service suffered downtime, it was hosting 9.2 million blogs at the time. Now the figure stands at 16 million. Over 6 million new blogs in a year is a pretty significant growth spike for the five year old hosted blogging service. Royal Pingdom notes that although a surge of users from Microsoft transitioning users of its Live Spaces blogs over to WordPress.com during 2010 can account for some of the spike, only half a million had actually ported over as of November.

Automattic explained to us today that while the Microsoft blogs helped, most of this growth has been organic. One thing that’s not clear is how many of these new blogs were from brand new bloggers and how many were second, third or fourth blogs. Another possibility is users churning from other competing platforms. One thing’s for sure though, those who predict the death of blogging will have some time to wait yet.