I love statistics. So much, I once worked for a market survey company. My job was to interpret our research numbers for the marketing executives (our clients) and I.loved.it. It’s kinda funny because I’m not a math genius but you don’t have to, in order to appreciate statistics.

Anyway, if you’ve ever looked at the WordPress marketplace and wondered if it’s saturated, let’s first take a look at how many websites there are out there now.

According to Internet Live Stats, it is more than 945,000,000 (945 million) as of time of writing. The number actually hit 1 billion some time last year but due to adjustments it’s down again. However, they think it will break the 1 billion mark again this year – 2015. Let’s use 1 billion for easier calculation.

Next, we need to be real. According to the site, only about 25% are active – the rest are parked domains or similar. Let’s set that aside for a little while. With a little math, we can figure out current active sites are around 250 million.

Now let us take a look at another piece of statistic. WordPress powers 23% of the Internet. It’s coming up close to 24%. Let’s be conservative and say 23%. The thing that I don’t know is if the base number of sites W3Tech is counting off is the same but we can only work with what we have. So 23% of 250 million is: 57.5 million.

57.5 million active websites using WordPress right now.

By the time you read this, the number has probably increased, by a few thousand(s), or even million(s) if you read this much later.

Sure, there are thousands of plugins out there and a lot of developers out there but – a word of caution. Don’t be fooled. A lot of people call themselves WordPress developers but what they mean is, they can create and design WordPress sites.

Some can only set it up and install some pre-made themes, some are several notches above and know how to hack an already developed theme to bend it to their will. Others actually know how to develop themes but those who can build a solid plugin from scratch – this is where the numbers begin to wind down. Those who know the core very well? They are harder to find. Still many but if you compare let’s say writers vs plugin developers – big difference.

What this means is, even at 57.5 million sites, this is a decent sized pie. If you can get just 1% market share for your plugin, that would be 575,000 websites. That’s a lot of sites and some decent income especially if you throw in annual licensing.

How Big A Business Are We Talking About?

What exactly does this look like? For that, we look to WooCommerce’s numbers. Why WooCommerce? Because Automattic recently acquired them and they are among the biggest plugin around.

It is estimated that WooCommerce is used on over 688,000 websites. Going back to our numbers, this means they have about 1.2% market share. We don’t know what kind of money WooCommerce makes, but it is reported that it rakes in revenue in the 8 figures.

If you need to know, $10 million is eight figures. So it makes anywhere between $10 and $99 million. As if that is not enough, the company is said to be “extremely profitable”. This matters a lot – because if you make $10 million but only get to keep $1 million, that is profitable yes but not so great. Extremely profitable is a very good thing.

I hope by now you’re getting an idea what kind of business is out there in the WordPress space.

Maybe you aren’t even that ambitious. Maybe you’d be happy with a 0.1% market share. Supporting only 57,500 websites. That’s nothing to sneeze at. I’d take that any day.

Do you still think it’s a saturated space? Yes?

Then let’s go back to the beginning, where we said 75% of the 1 billion sites are parked domains or similar. These can come online anytime. Soon, for every 4 websites that come online, one will be WordPress. Even if those never become active. New sites are added every second, every minute, every day. The pie is not static folks. It’s growing rapidly.

On top of that, in his WooCommerce acquisition announcement, Matt Mullenweg had already said, they are working towards growing their market share to 51%. Heady times ahead!

Doesn’t all this make you want to get into the WordPress space? There’s plenty of opportunities like:

• Design
• Theme development
• Support
• Security
• Plugins
• Third party systems that work with WordPress

Some are a lot easier to get into than others. Like plugins. They are a very attractive product to sell but many just don’t have the knowledge or help to do it effectively for a sustained period, in order to build a true business.

The good news is, you don’t have to anymore. Over at Plugin Mill, we design, develop and maintain the plugins for you. All you do is sell it and support your customers. Join us in this exciting business. Take a look at the library of over 30 plugins you can start selling.

If that’s not for you, there’s still plenty of room. Especially in the support and services arena.