Changing Way

This blog, like most hosted by WordPress.com, carries ads, albeit not all the time. Automattic controls the ads and gets the money from them. It’s one of the ways in which Automattic makes money from the free WordPress.com service. So this blog, like many hosted by WordPress.com, includes posts about ads and the wish that they were banished from the blog.

The same wish is sometimes expressed on the support forums, although not as often as the wish to be able to control and profit from the ads on one’s blog. People seeking such control and profit seem incapable of using the forum’s search box. The many forum threads include frequent reference to Automattic’s statement that: In the future you’ll be able to purchase an upgrade to either turn the ads off or show your own ads and make money from your blog.

This is course raises the question of how much such an upgrade might cost. I just saw an estimate from the redoubtable raincoaster.

But my guess (and it’s a total guess) is that if there were an upgrade to take Adsense off your blog, it would have to cost at least ten bucks a month. So $120 a year, just to replace the income WP.com makes from the average blog here.

Raincoaster doesn’t work for Automattic or for Google, and she did stress that she’s guessing. But I’d take her “total guess” over a confident prediction by many other people. In particular, I’m inclined to think that she’d got the decimal point in the right place.

I’m also inclined to think that most of us who were planning an upgrade to ad-free had in mind an annual cost of $15 or thereabouts, in line with other upgrades. If it would cost Automattic around 10 times that, we might be waiting a long time for an upgrade we’d care to pay for.

This post concludes my series on Automattic making money. The best structure for the post seems to be the time-honoured, time-based structure: past, present, and future.

I’ll start with a list of the past posts in this series.

• How is Automattic Going to Make Money? is the introduction to the series, which I posted almost two months ago now.
• Making Money From WordPress.com. This, the most successful post at this blog so far, is about how Automattic makes money from the WordPress.com service it hosts.
• Automattic Profits From WordPress, the open source software project.
• Automattic Making Money From Other Projects, such as Akismet.

Now, on to Automattic’s past. In some ways, there isn’t much of it, since the firm was founded in December 2005, and is often described as a startup. But there is more history than that might suggest. WordPress is the successor to b2/cafelog, which goes back to June 2001. One of the reasons this is important is that WordPress inherited from b2 its use of the GPL, and hence has always been free/open source software.

WordPress 1.0 was released in 2004. That same year, Yahoo acquired Toni Schneider’s startup, Oddpost, and so Toni joined Yahoo. While there, he founded the Yahoo developer network which allows third party software developers to use Yahoo as a platform for creating Yahoo-powered applications and services.

As CEO of Automattic, Toni has cultivated what might be termed the WordPress developer network, but is referred to as the WordPress ecosystem by shameless buzzword-slingers. This ecosystem includes WordPress consultants, theme developers, and plugin developers.

My main comment on the present is that things are changing fast. I’ll give an example of change for each of the following: WordPress.com, WordPress, and Akismet. Sonific is one of the means by which you can include music in a WordPress.com post. That will cease to be true on May 1, when Sonific is going offline.

WordPress 2.5 was released about a month ago. Its emphasis is on usability, but not everyone considers it an improvement. When WordPress.com moved to the 2.5 code base, there were complaints about the new admin interface, and about the suddenness of the change. Bloggers using WordPress (as opposed to .com) of course have more control over their blogs, including control over when to move to the new interface.

As a third and final example of recent change, consider Mollom. It’s a new competitor for Akismet, and will probably be a strong one.

If you read this far in the hope of finding bold predictions about Automattic’s future, you’re out of luck. If such predictions ever do come from me, they will probably get their own post. The best hint about the future, and hence the best closing sentence for this post and for the series, is one that Matt wrote after Automattic raised a second round of funding ($29.5M) earlier this year.

Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.

If we assessed the popularity of requests in the WordPress.com forums for new features, Sphere would probably be in the top 10. (By the way, the feature most requested on the forums is AdSense under the control of the blogger.)

Well, WordPress.com just got more spherical. The new possibly related posts feature uses Sphere to generate links at the end of a post.

If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we’ll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we’ll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media.

Visitors to your blog won’t always see possibly related posts. The links don’t show up on the main page of your blog, or for posts when Sphere can’t find related posts. You can turn the feature off entirely. Matt says that the feature will be tweaked as feedback and other data come in.

By other, I mean other than WordPress. We are almost at the end of my series of posts on Automattic, and how the firm makes money. We’ll start by noting that the firm provides a handy summary of its projects. Some of them are covered in earlier posts in this series (e.g., WordPress.com).

There are three non-WordPress projects: Akismet, bbPress, and Gravatar. (Actually, to describe them as “non-WordPress” is to simplify since, as we will see, each has firm connections to WordPress.) I find the first of these the most interesting, and I know I’m not alone in that. Askismet is an ambitious project.

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

Although Akismet is an Automattic project and is WordPress.com’s spam cop, it is not only for WordPress blogs. The Akismet API is published so that the server can be invoked from other applications.

The Akismet server is unusual among Automattic projects in that it is closed source. This seems to be the norm for spam-fighting server code: it is also true of Akismet’s rivals Defensio and Mollom.

Automattic, as a privately-held firm, is under no obligation to provide details of how much money it makes from specific projects. But Duncan Riley at TechCrunch described Akismet as Automattic’s biggest money earner. Toni, Automattic’s CEO, was quick to counter what he described as “misconceptions,” stating that Akismet is not even close to being Automattic’s biggest earner.

Direct earnings from Akismet come from commercial licenses. Indirect earnings arise from the extent to which Akismet helps convince bloggers to choose WordPress.com.

Moving on to the other other projects, bbPress is forum software. It runs the various WordPress forums. To put it another way, bbPress is the name under which Automattic released the software on which the WordPress.org support forums have been running for years. Automattic intends to offer hosted forums under the name TalkPress (rather as it offers hosted blogging at WordPress.com).

Gravatar is notable among Automattic projects for having been acquired; I believe it to be Automattic’s only acquisition so far. At the time of the acquisition, Om Malik described Gravatar as a small project that gives WordPress users the ability to add avatars to their profiles. It is clear from the Gravatar about page that there are far loftier ambitions for the project. Today, an avatar. Tomorrow, Your Identity—Online.

I’ll stop there, rather than speculate about the future of online identity. I’ll add one more post to this series: a wrapup.

This is another post prompted by my favorite podcast, Coverville. Anyone out there with experience migrating blogs from Movable Type to WordPress, and with a love of cover versions? If so, please contact me or Brian. Brian (Mr Coverville) is having blog trouble.

I’ve just upgraded the blog to Movable Type 4.1… But for whatever reason, I can’t make the comments work…

Honestly, I’d rather move the whole blog to WordPress (which all of my other blogs are using), but I think that with the number of posts, comments and links I have, it would be a huge undertaking.

If you think you might be able to help, please contact me (andrew at thisblog) or Brian (and mention my name).

If you’ve read this far, you deserve some good music, so here’s Elvis Costello covering Tom Waits.

Sonific provides a music player and access to music, thus allowing you to place music on your web site. It’s one of the ways in which you can put music on a blog hosted at WordPress.com, as this one is.

The above will cease to be true on May 1, when Sonific will go offline. A message by Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO explains why.

There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them ‘free’ company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.

In other words, Sonific cannot provide a wide enough selection of music to compete without risking legal action or losing money. I don’t expect Sonific to come back online.

I’m sorry to see Sonific go, having used it a few times at this very blog, starting in July last year. There are still multiple ways to get music on a WordPress.com blog.

I saw the news of Sonific going offline on the WordPress.com forums. I expect that there will be discussion of any replacement in the same topic.

Fred Wilson puts the difference at $14.8B - if we take “the publicly available information about the most recent financings of the two companies ($15bn for Facebook and $200mm for Automattic)” to provide good measures of the respective company’s values. But Fred isn’t any more impressed with that measurement that I am.

I think that some aspects of Fred’s post could use clarification. I’ll continue the job of clarification started in a comment by Jeff Jarvis. I’ll also plug some of my own writing about WordPress.

After quoting the funny money numbers, Fred moves on to a chart of unique visitors to Facebook and to “WordPress.” Jeff’s clarification is that the WordPress line in that chart almost certainly refers to the site WordPress.com, and that many WordPress blogs are hosted elsewhere. Jeff also remarks that WordPress is a platform, not a social network.

We need to be clear about three different but related entities.

• WordPress is free/open source software. It can be downloaded from WordPress.org.
• Automattic is the privately-held firm founded by Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress.
• WordPress.com is a host for WordPress blogs. It is owned by Automattic; it is not the firm’s only project.

Comparing unique visitors at Facebook.com and at WordPress.com is comparing an apple with an orange. Automattic has other oranges in its bag, and hence has other revenue streams. If we want to compare the $ values of Facebook and Automattic, we should look at all the oranges in Automattic’s bag, and not just at WordPress.com.

Having noted the clarification in Jeff’s comment, I’d like to follow up on another statement from the same comment: “WordPress is not a network. WordPress is a platform.” That’s mostly true, but it ignores a couple of important points.

First, WordPress has several of the ingredients of a social network. Consider, for example, Diso: “an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of… social networking concepts… first target is WordPress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.” I’ve added emphasis to show that Chris Messina and his buddies consider WordPress a good starting point for an open, standards-based social network.

Second, WordPress.com has several network-like features. Once signed on to WordPress.com, you can leave comments on other blogs hosted there (including this one) without having to provide further identity. There are WordPress.com-wide tag and category pages; as an example, here’s the page for the tag automattic.

One of the things that makes Automattic interesting is that it’s in the business of making money from free software. If you share my interest in this aspect of Automattic, you might want to check out my series of posts on it. It starts with this introduction. The most successful post in the series (indeed, on this blog) is the one on making money from WordPress.com.

I don’t attempt to put a $ value on Automattic. I am convinced that its $ value does not lag that of Facebook by many billions of dollars. I think that Fred Wilson shares my conviction. I wonder if he attempted to get his VC firm, Union Square Ventures, a piece of the Automattic action. Earlier this year, Automattic got a $29.5M round of funding.

That choice was the theme of a talk recently given at a conference in San Francisco. You can see a video of the talk at the blog of either of the presenters. Andy uses Blogger, Selena uses WordPress. I found the video via Kieran, who uses Drupal.

Here’s my summary of the 18-minute video.

• Preamble. We’re not trying to pick a winner, but to highlight the differences between D and W.
• Getting site started: W+.
• Managing site as it grows more complex: D+.
• What does the software want to do with data? D: whatever you like. W: publish it.
• Who’s the focus of the community? D: developers. W: users.
• Wrapup.

That’s the Blog Herald, not the Boston Herald. Lorelle linked to my post on how Automattic is making money from WordPress.com. In the same edition of WordPress Wednesday News, she links to dozens of other places as well, but she doesn’t describe all those other places as “interesting.”

Lorelle does mention the “issues on the WordPress.com support forums over the new Administration Panels interface.” But her emphasis falls on 2.5 features and security issues.

Of the many topics in the WordPress.com support forums prompted by the “2.5″ redesign, the largest currently has 167 responses. There’s a lot of repetition and agreement in there. That’s not a criticism of (most of) those who’ve repeated and agreed, since the forums are there for the bloggers. But it does make for some tedious reading.

So I was struck by a recent contribution, which expressed a fresher concern.

The only thing that worries me is how the changed dashboard and entry pages will feel to an absolutely new, tyro blogger with little or no web experience. Will they be frightened away?

I think that the new design (not the new bugs) will feel better to a new blogger than did the old design. I’d be interested to hear if anyone’s done any testing on this.

I get the impression that the WordPress.org community is less bothered about the new design than is the WordPress.com community. I can think of several reasons for this. For example, the .org community comprises those who upgrade the WordPress software for themselves, and so will install 2.5 when they’re ready.

So, I’m thinking that: if we plotted approval of 2.5 against blogger experience, we’d see a U-shaped curve. Those who approve least tend to be moderately experienced bloggers, of which there are many at WordPress.com.

I should add that the U-shaped curve thought is a rather tentative hypothesis about what we’d find if we gathered data from WordPress bloggers on a couple of variables. There would of course be “outliers,” such as WordPress.com bloggers who love the new interface and novice bloggers who hate it.