WordPress Dominates Blogs, But Squarespace is Gunning For It With Version 6 | Hacker News Reader

WordPress Dominates Blogs, But Squarespace is Gunning For It With Version 6

pandodaily.com

9 pointswmeredith8 comments

That was a disappointingly poor article.

It seems a product no-one has heard of (a "best kept secret"), which requires a monthly subscription, and is used by no blog of note, is going to try to challenge WordPress. It is unclear in the extreme why it thinks it has any chance of doing that.

Don't know if it's a good product or if the article is well written (I try not to read anything from Pando) but I thought Squarespace was pretty well known.

They used to (and maybe still do, I stopped listening to TWIT) get a lot of plugs from their sponsorship on several of the TWIT network's podcasts, which have a pretty big combined listenership.

They sponsor many of the 5by5 podcasts- Merlin Mann's Back To Work in particular.

I agree, and it seems that Pando is spreading the notion on the basis that Squarespace is making money. This paragraph is most important in the article:

> In fact, the company mostly serves smaller blogs and businesses. It has tens of thousands of users, Casalena said, compared with WordPress’s 73 million and Tumblr’s 51 million. The key is Squarespace’s users are all paying a monthly fee. Squarespace is positioned as an alternative to paying some developer $5000 to make a site.

This paragraph at once defines and antagonizes the thesis of the article. It defines the thesis in that, if Squarespace is making a product worth using, it will spread to areas outside its current target audience. However, at the same time, it would be ludicrous to assume that independent bloggers currently comfortable with WordPress would switch to a non-free product any time soon--we're talking about moving millions of users of a free product to a paid one. How many of these bloggers can afford to move? What are the advantages of moving? The article is disappointing because it does not answer any of these questions while assuming the conclusion.

Regardless of article quality, I'd like to mention that Squarespace is an amazing company and absolutely deserves more attention that it's getting right now.

I'm not an employee of squarespace, but I have been in touch with many people who work there, and not only are they all incredibly cool people, but they have some really brilliant designers and devs and are working on an incredible product. Their CEO does a lot of the front end dev and is an absolute genius.

In addition, they are all about the NY tech community. I teach a free class on web design and development (http://skl.sh/HMoAx3) and they have generously hosted me free in their gorgeous office many times. That kind of dedication to education and bringing together the tech community in NYC is really impressive.

Like it or not, blogging has become a "social" thing nowadays. WordPress and Tumblr have huge communities of users who browse one another's blogs, comment on one another's posts, reblog random things, etc. You can't compete with that on features alone. When you visit a random WordPress or Tumblr blog, and if you're a blogger too, you're likely to be logged in already. That's an advantage that can't be ignored.

If this Squarespace thing has no intention to compete with WordPress on the "social" front, that's cool, there's nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of individuals and organizations who just want a reliable blog at a reasonable price and don't care about Tumblr-like features. But if that's the market they're targeting, the article's title is misleading.

BTW, Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial. But do you seriously think a lot of people will go through the hassle of moving their blog to a new service, change nameservers on their domain, wait a day for the change to take effect, try out a bunch of features, and if not completely satisfied, move their blog away again, change nameservers again, etc. all within a span of 14 days?

you're dead on — i was thinking the same thing: their mindset of going head-to-head w developers who charge $5k for a site seems a pretty thin market - they should be going after Tumblr rather than WordPress.

Even Wordpress is going after Tumblr. Do a Quantcast on both of them and see the difference.

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