Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in November 2006, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In late 2006, a now-forgotten blog called Modern Life is Rubbish published something quietly remarkable: a breakdown of what the Technorati Top 100 bloggers were actually using. Platform choices, monetization methods, color schemes, dominant languages. The whole thing was illustrated with pie charts, which felt almost extravagant for the era.
Analysis of the current top blogs at the time surfaced a finding that cut against the prevailing intuition: only 12% of the top 100 blogs ran on WordPress. Custom-built CMS platforms claimed 45%. WordPress didn’t even beat Typepad among elite blogs. The king of the long tail, someone quipped, wasn’t the king anywhere else.
Nearly two decades later, that data point deserves a second look — not as trivia, but as a lens for understanding how the relationship between platform, audience, and power has always been more complicated than it seems.
What the numbers were actually saying
The surprise in the 2006 data wasn’t that WordPress was small. WordPress had only launched in 2003. The surprise was the gap between perception and reality — the sense that WordPress was already everywhere, when in fact it had only conquered a particular stratum of the web.
Custom CMS platforms dominated at the top because the top blogs of that era — think Engadget, Gawker Media properties, TechCrunch — were essentially small media companies. They had developers. They had infrastructure. They had specific editorial and technical needs that an off-the-shelf tool couldn’t yet meet. WordPress was for individuals. The big blogs weren’t run by individuals in any meaningful sense.
The 24% AdSense figure followed the same logic. Google’s ad product was frictionless for solo bloggers, but top-tier properties were already negotiating direct sponsorships and display deals. AdSense was the long tail’s monetization engine, not the elite’s.
What looked like WordPress losing was actually two different internets occupying the same space — the individual creator layer and the proto-media layer — each optimizing for completely different things.
The platform gap and what closed it
The story of the decade that followed is the story of WordPress closing that gap. By the mid-2010s, it powered not just hobbyist blogs but major news organizations, enterprise sites, and everything in between. The 2006 data now reads like a before photograph. WordPress grew by solving the problems that had kept it out of the top tier: scalability, plugin ecosystems, editorial workflows, performance infrastructure.
But there’s a subtler lesson embedded in that trajectory. The reason custom CMS platforms dominated in 2006 wasn’t purely technical superiority — it was organizational fit. Large editorial operations needed tools shaped around their workflows, not generic solutions they’d have to adapt around. WordPress won eventually because it became flexible enough to be shaped, not because the organizations changed to suit it.
This distinction matters today because the same dynamic plays out across every new platform wave. When creators and publishers dismiss a tool as “not enterprise-ready” or “too basic,” they’re often describing a gap that’s already closing. And when they over-invest in proprietary infrastructure to stay ahead of that curve, they sometimes find themselves maintaining expensive custom systems while the open platform catches up.
The monetization illusion hasn’t gone away
The AdSense figure from 2006 is worth dwelling on for another reason. At the time, the assumption was that serious blogs monetized with AdSense because it was the visible, default option. The reality — that elite properties had already moved past it — came as a mild shock.
Today, the equivalent assumption is that serious creators monetize through sponsorships and brand deals. And while that’s largely true for top-tier 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 heavily on display advertising and affiliate revenue, not the podcast sponsorship model that dominates creator industry coverage.
The visibility bias is structural: the monetization approaches most discussed in media and creator communities tend to be the ones used by the creators who are most visible in those communities. The long tail’s actual economics stay quieter. In 2006, most people overestimated AdSense’s reach at the top. Today, most people underestimate how much of the blogging economy still runs on models that get very little coverage.
Why elite behavior is a poor map for everyone else
The most enduring lesson from the 2006 Technorati analysis is methodological. The study described what the top 100 were doing. It said almost nothing about what worked for the other several million blogs that existed at the time, or what was likely to work for the people reading about the results.
This is a persistent problem in publishing advice. Best practices get extracted from the behavior of outliers and handed down as universal guidance. The top 100 bloggers in 2006 used custom CMS platforms — therefore, perhaps, serious bloggers needed custom platforms? That conclusion would have been wrong, and expensive to act on.
The same dynamic shows up constantly today. A creator with ten million subscribers optimizes their workflow in a particular way. That workflow gets profiled, discussed, and imitated — often by creators operating at a completely different scale, with different audiences and different constraints, for whom the approach may be actively counterproductive.
Data about the top of any distribution describes the top of that distribution. It’s interesting. It’s sometimes genuinely instructive. But it requires translation before it becomes useful, and the translation step is the one that most advice skips.
Reading the archive forward
There’s something clarifying about going back to a moment when WordPress was a long-tail tool, AdSense was assumed to be everywhere it wasn’t, and custom infrastructure was the mark of a serious operation. Not because the specific facts still apply — they don’t — but because the underlying patterns keep recurring.
Every era has its version of the gap between what visible success looks like and what actually produces results across the full distribution. Every era has its dominant-platform assumption that turns out to be narrower than it appeared. Every era has its monetization model that gets generalized from a subset of creators it actually fits.
The 2006 snapshot is a reminder to hold current assumptions lightly — especially the ones that feel most obviously true.
