How Does WordPress Make Money? | Hacker News Reader

How Does WordPress Make Money?

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82 pointspowertower18 comments

Important to differentiate between WordPress (the open source project, owned by everyone, and no-one, technically speaking), WordPress.org (the domain name owned by Matt Mullenweg), 'The WordPress Foundation' (holder of the WP TM, also founded and essentially controlled by Matt) and Automattic (the company, founded by Matt, behind wp.com).

The domain name makes the $s through hosting referrals (although you'd imagine that the wp.com self-hosted referrals have long since blown that outta the water) - no idea how or if that rev is distributed.

Automattic, despite being 'barely for profit' (makes me chuckle that, everytime :) would, by my guess, make the vast amount of it's cash through adwords - they used to not show to FF users as they clicked less but they may have changed that now... regardless, they're managed in such a way that bloggers at wp.com will rarely, if ever see them.

Genius, from back in the day: http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2007/11/21/making-money-with-ads...

However, they have also been aggressively monetizing some of their other offerings like http://akismet.com (go try sign up there for free, also genius), VaultPress (kicked us off a few ad spots that one did!) and, of course, 'upgrades' to wp.com accounts.

And then there's the jetpack trojan horse into self-hosted WP installs:

http://wpmu.org/why-jetpack-reallypacks-a-punch-and-the-futu...

VIP hosting etc. has always been a moneyspinner from day 1.

Anyway, if you want a model of how an open source project can be effectively transformed into a money-making beast, while at the same time retaining (if not enhancing) your humble geek GPL cred, look no further.

You might not necessarily like it, but you can't fail to be impressed.

[not really a disclaimer, more FYI, I'm the CEO of http://incsub.com - we have more than a few WP interests...]

It says they serve ads sometimes on free blogs, but if the visitor is using Firefox, they will not serve ads.

Anyone know why not?

WordPress.com serves ads to everyone unless you are logged in to a WordPress.com account or are running some kind of ad blocking plugin in your browser. This bit about not serving ads simply because you are running Firefox is simply untrue.

Actually, it is true.

I'm not sure the exact history of it all, but I know that at a State of the Word presentation at a WordCamp many years ago, Matt M said that they were serving ads to Internet Explorer users to try to convince them to switch.

<disclaimer>I am an Automattic employee.</disclaimer>

We do serve ads equally to all browser types. :)

[edited to note that I am talking about ads that can potentially generate revenue, not any other ads we may have run in the past to convince people to upgrade their browsers]

> We do serve ads equally to all browser types. :)

Contrary to what it said on your site when we signed up, it appears that you also serve very much non-text ads these days as well. We discovered this when someone sent us a screenshot of a (large, bright white) ad for a vaguely related product displayed right underneath a (medium-sized, dark-background) screenshot of our new product on our custom-styled (dark coloured) blog.

This was on a blog for which we have paid actual money for various premium features, and to say that we were unimpressed at how unprofessional-looking this made our post would be an understatement. I was really hoping that this was some sort of dubiousware installed on the visitor in question's browser and not something done by the WP site, but I notice that the explanation about ads on your site has since changed to remove the "text" qualifier, though it certainly hadn't at the time the offending ad was displayed or when we chose to use your service and pay you money for the extra features.

Must have been a policy change, it used to be IE only..

http://garry.posterous.com/matt-mullenweg-and-toni-schnei

It sounds like an effective way to force users to update/upgrade their software.

It's much more likely that their Firefox user-base had extremely low click-throughs on ads, so they turned it off for them, and in turn increased the overall click-through numbers ... which can influence how much they get per click.

I don't get the third condition either. "3. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So a person reaching abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com won't see any Google Ads."

Why would they deny themselves this revenue?

Increases the quality of the experience for existing customers.

I'm a VERY happy WordPress VIP hosting and support client, they are one of the best vendors I've ever worked with - I'd encourage anyone with a site big enough, to look at the VIP program, it's just fantastic.

Missing from the article is mention of VaultPress, the WordPress backup and support service http://vaultpress.com/

and a lot of other aspects I'm sure, given the article is over 2 years old..

Such a fascinating article, I guess there is money in open source software, provided you execute as well as the Automaticc team.

Automattic. Two 't's, after the creator, Matt Mullenweg.

Hmmm, straight after posting my comment I've been somehow labeled as a spammer :/ Any connection? If someone could untag me so I can share stuff again / participate that'd be great...

It also explains why they wanted the thesis theme to be GNU: so they can add it to their services and not have to pay for it, giving them more potential value at less cost to them.

Evil, but brilliant.

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