CMS Market Share Report - Joomla! in Top 3

Positive Impact

Written by Andrew Eddie

Good analytics are hard to come by and are time consuming to collect. Nevertheless, Ric Shreves of Water and Stone has complied a paper entitled Open Source CMS Market Share which analyzes 19 of the most prominent Open Source Content Management Systems. In this paper, Shreves identifies three systems that, in his words, dominate the present market. These systems are Wordpress, our own Joomla! and Drupal. In additional, Shreves concludes that "these systems consistently finish at the top of the comparisons, in many cases the gap between those three systems and the rest of the pack was significant. In key Adoption and Brand metrics these three names showed not just strength, but dominance".

Shreves selected for his sample group 19 Open Source systems that were publication oriented. These included, in alphabetical order, b2evolution, CMSMadeSimple, Drupal, e107, Elgg, eZ Publish, Joomla!, Mambo, MediaWiki, MODx, php-Nuke, phpWebSite, Pligg, Plone, SPIP, TikiWiki, Typo3, WordPress and finally Xoops.

The full paper is available at Shreves’s site, but in this summary I will draw your attention to the results that demonstrate how Joomla! fairs in the top-three segment.

Two major metrics were examined - Rate of Adoption and Brand Strength. Rate of Adoption was broken into three characteristics: downloads, installations and third-party support. Brand Strength was broken down into four sub-characteristics: Search Engine Visibility, Popularity, Mindshare and Reputation.

Rate of Adoption

Within the Adoption Metric, only one of the characteristics was deemed to have significant and reliable relevance, and this was in the area of Third Party Support. The following tables/graphs shows the number of providers offering services on Elance and Guru respectively.

Elance providers offering services

 Guru providers offering services

The number of books in print was also identified as a sign of strength.  Comparisons were made between the total number of English books in print (shown below), and also the number published in the last twelve months.

Overall Books in Print

Brand Strength

Inbound links a metric that measures the good will of project since linking is voluntary.  Shreves makes the comment that MediaWiki is possibly over represented due to the effect of WikiPedia and php-Nuke is still bathing in glory of it's former stature.

Inbound Links to the Official Websites

Alexa, while not accurate, does provide anecdotal evidence of the popularity of sites relative to each other (within the Alexa universe).

Alexa Rankings 17 July 2008 (lower is better)

Given this age of transient information and low attention spans, what people are talking about now is a good measure of brand strength and popularity in general.  Using Google's Blog Search facitity the following information was garnered.

Number of Mentions in the Blogosphere in the 30 days before 23 July 2008

It is interesting to note that the data happened to capture a spike due to the release of a new Joomla! version.  While this does skew the results, the fact remains that the blogosphere chatter surged a whopping 15 times above the baseline average (see the graph on page 27 of the paper - it is very impressive).  A WordPress spike was also captured reaching around 2 to 3 times above the baseline average.

Activity in the social networking scene was also observed.  MySpace, Google Groups and Facebook were all looked at.  The following graph samples just the data about members in Facebook groups.

Facebook Group Members

Along a similar vein, social bookmarking activity was also measured using Del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit as benchmarks.  The results for Del.icio.us are shown below.

Del.icio.us Activity

Closing Thoughts

I was really quite impressed with this paper both for its methodology and its objectivity.  I've covered some of the highlights here but there is certainly more in the paper that is worth savoring - certainly worth sending to the colour printer and leaving on the office coffee table for a browse at lunch.  It is certainly a good reference document for anyone making a pitch for a Joomla! install, especially to IT departments that may be a bit wary of this Open Source "stuff".

One of the most telling graphs is that of historical search performance (page 37).  "Joomla! took the lead in the metric early and has never looked back", says Shreves.  The duality in meaning of that statement is profound and I believe one of the major reasons for Joomla!'s success - never look back.

The strength of the top 3 in the market is really quite something - it is a testament to the dedication of each of the projects involved.  When I'm at trade expo's and other events I'm often asked the inevitable question - which is better, Joomla! or Drupal.  I think Shreves has adequately demonstrated that the answer to that question is "both".  Whichever you choose, you are going to end up with a world class Web site.

I think this paper strongly indicates that all three - WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal - have entered a new level and are still climbing.

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