The Joomla Project announced last weekend that Joomla has been downloaded from its site ten million times. An impressive number worthy of attention.

The more interesting question is how many Joomla-powered website are there?

We can assume that the Joomla installation package has been implemented many more times than the download count, considering the many hosting companies that offer a one click install script with their hosting services. Given these additional installs, we could guess that there are tens of millions of Joomla websites on the web.

Or we could go with Barrie's estimate over at our sister site Compass Designs. Two years ago this week he did some analysis that showed there were at least 10 million Joomla sites. Now he reckons that number must have increased since June 2007.

Think all these numbers are low? Pie in the sky? Check out this comment thread to join a thoughtful debate about how to best make such an estimate. Clearly, number of downloads does not equate with number of sites!

When counting, don't forget to include our hosted "Joomla as a service" model over at our sister company Simplweb, where many thousand more Joomla sites thrive.

Numbers aside, we congratulate the Joomla Project team for the incredible success of our favorite CMS platform. Looking ahead to a hundred million!

Update

@davevalko pointed out some interesting statistics from builtwith.com.

Distribution of the top web technologies

We can see here that Joomla is lagging a bit in the standings, but looks at other trends like Search Trends from Google would contradict this somewhat.

How many Joomla sites do you think there are?