Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in November 2006, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In late 2006, a now-forgotten blog called Modern Life is Rubbish quietly published something remarkable: Technorati Top 100 Bloggers they actually used it. Platform options, monetization methods, color schemes, dominant languages. Everything is illustrated with pie charts that are almost extravagant for the era.
An analysis of the top blogs at the time came to a counterintuitive conclusion: only 12% of the top 100 blogs ran on WordPress. Custom-made CMS platforms claimed 45%. WordPress didn’t even beat Typepad among the elite blogs. The king of the long tail, someone joked, was not king anywhere else.
Nearly two decades later, this data point deserves a second look—not as trivia, but as a lens through which to understand that the relationship between platform, audience, and power is more complex than it always seems.
What the numbers actually said
The surprise in the 2006 data wasn’t that WordPress was small. WordPress was only launched in 2003. The surprising part was the gap between perception and reality – the feeling that WordPress was already everywhere, when in fact it had conquered only a certain segment of the Internet.
Custom CMS platforms dominated at the top because the top blogs of the time—think Engadget, Gawker Media features, TechCrunch—were essentially small media companies. They had developers. They had the infrastructure. They had specific editorial and technical needs that an off-the-shelf tool could not yet meet. WordPress was for individuals. The big blogs were not run by individuals in any meaningful sense.
The 24% AdSense figure follows the same logic. Google’s ad product was frictionless for solo bloggers, but top properties were already negotiating direct sponsorship and display deals. AdSense was the monetization engine of the long tail, not the elite.
What WordPress seemed to be missing was actually two different webs occupying the same space—a custom creative layer and a proto-media layer—each optimized for completely different things.
The platform gap and what closed it
The story of the next decade is the story of WordPress closing that gap. By the mid-2010s, it powered not only hobbyist blogs, but major news organizations, enterprise sites, and everything in between. The 2006 data now reads like the previous photo. WordPress grew by solving the problems that kept it out of the top tier: scalability, plugin ecosystems, editorial workflows, performance infrastructure.
But there is a more subtle lesson in this trajectory. The reason why custom CMS platforms dominated in 2006 wasn’t purely technical advantage—it was organizational fit. Large editorial operations need tools that are shaped around their workflows, not generic solutions that they must adapt to. WordPress eventually won, not because organizations changed to suit it, but because it was flexible enough to be shaped.
This distinction is important today, as the same dynamic plays out in each new wave of platforms. When developers and publishers dismiss a tool as “not enterprise-ready” or “too simple,” they’re often describing a gap that’s already closing. And when they overinvest in proprietary infrastructure to stay ahead of the curve, they sometimes find themselves maintaining expensive proprietary systems as the open platform matures.
The illusion of making money has not disappeared
The 2006 AdSense figure is worth dwelling on for another reason. At the time, it was assumed that serious blogs were making money with AdSense because it was the default, visible option. The reality—that elite properties had already passed him by—came as a mild shock.
Today, the equivalent assumption is that serious creators make money through sponsorships and brand deals. And while this is mostly true for top YouTube channels and newsletters, the data often tells a more fragmented story. Orbit Media’s annual blogger surveys consistently show that a meaningful share of high-traffic bloggers still rely on display ads and affiliate income rather than the podcast sponsorship model that dominates creative industry coverage.
Visibility bias is structural: the monetization approaches most discussed in the media and creative communities are typically those used by the most visible creators in those communities. The actual economics of the long tail remain quieter. In 2006, most people overestimated AdSense’s peak. Most people today underestimate how much of the blogging economy still operates on very under-exposed models.
Why is elite behavior a poor map for everyone?
The most enduring lesson from the 2006 Technorati analysis is methodological. The study described what the top 100 did. It said almost nothing about what was working for the several million other blogs out there at the time, or what might work for the people reading about the results.
This is an ongoing problem when posting tips. Best practices are extracted from the behavior of outsiders and passed on as universal guidelines. The top 100 bloggers of 2006 used dedicated CMS platforms – so maybe serious bloggers needed dedicated platforms? This conclusion would be wrong and expensive to follow.
The same dynamic continues to manifest itself today. A creator with ten million subscribers optimizes his workflow in a certain way. This workflow is profiled, debated, and imitated—an approach that can be actively counterproductive by creators who often operate at completely different scales, with different audiences and different constraints.
Information about the upper part of any distribution describes the upper part of that distribution. It is interesting. Sometimes it’s really instructive. But translation is required before it can be useful, and the translation step is one that most advice skips.
Reads the archive forward
There’s something enlightening about going back to a time when WordPress was a long-tail tool, AdSense was ubiquitous, and dedicated infrastructure was the hallmark of a serious operation. Not because the specific facts still apply, but because the basic patterns repeat themselves.
Each era has its own version of the difference between what apparent success looks like and what actually results in full distribution. Every era has a dominant-platform hypothesis that turns out to be narrower than it seems. There is a generalized monetization model from a group of creators that each era actually adapts to.
The 2006 snapshot is a reminder to keep current assumptions light — especially the most obviously true ones.
