It was initially reported by Microsoft (and repeated by WPCandy) that the shutting down of Windows Live Spaces would result in roughly 30 million migrations to WordPress.com.
Joe Wilcox on BetaNews has since acquired internal email messages from Microsoft that allegedly assert that the “30 million customers” statistic was inflated and that only 1% of Windows Live Spaces blogs are active.
As reported on BetaNews, the email reads:
“The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M ‘blogs’ — most are dead. WordPress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a ‘who has the best online service for blogging for our customers’ and had nothing to do with technology.”
Paul Kim, Automattic’s VP of User Growth, has said in response that there’s no exact estimate on the number of users Automattic is expecting to migrate from Spaces, however he revealed that within the first 48 hours WordPress.com completed nearly 50,000 blog migrations. “If there are only 300,000 actual active blogs,” he said, “we’ll be able to determine that very soon.”
This is something I have been saying all along.
The 30 million number is misleading. Only a small percentage of the 30 million users are actually active… but then you have to factor in that only a percentage of those active users are going to elect to migrate their sites. It’s not an automated process.
That being said, it’s still a great deal for Automattic. Not only from the press coverage and increased exposure but the elimination of an active competitor. Even if the total number of users isn’t significant it’s still a good deal for them to make.