Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress and Automattic) was recently interviewed by the legendary Robert Scoble (who was taking questions from users on Twitter).
During the interview (which was produced by Silicon Prairie News) Matt shared his opinions regarding AdSense, WordPress security, hosting companies and even social buttons (the latter which he humorously referred to as “mullets”). [Read more…]
Matt Mullengweg (the founder of WordPress and Automattic) recently was able to answer some questions regarding the strength of WordPress at Le Web (one of the leading tech conference in Europe).
While some of the questions answered at Le Web were not surprising (i.e. his desire for Automattic to avoid being acquired), a few answers regarding revenues for WP.com were.
Are you making money?
We’re focused on growth right now, so we’ve invested a lot in infrastructure and so on. We haven’t been focused on revenues so far, but I can tell you we’re break-even.
How big is the company right now?
We’re about 74 people. In terms of revenues to sustain our growth, I’d say we make a little under $1 million a month from all our services combined.
(TechCrunch: that’s roughly $10 million a year, based on that statement and what we’ve heard from other sources.) (via TechCrunch)
Note: Questions in bold were asked by Alexia Tsotsis
Matt Mullenweg later went on to explain that most of Automattic’s revenues come from selling premium features and hosting services which are apparently generating a nice sum of cash for the company every month.
While it’s good to hear that WordPress has a solid business plan (something Tumblr has yet to discover), what was surprising to this author is the fact that WP.com has not yet become a very lucrative enterprise already, despite boasting superior features when compared against rivals.
Although it’s inevitable that Automattic will eventually become a thriving company (especially after convincing Microsoft to surrender its blog users to WP.com), hopefully freemium and premium services like Akismet and VaultPress, respectively, can help quickly push WP.com deep into the black.
Every WordPress blogger who didn’t live under a rock recently has noticed that there have been many heated debates in the WordPress scene this year:
And with yesterday’s switch from Cutline to Coraline on WP.com the debate has been revived once more. [Read more…]
The Automattic has announced the launch of wp.me shorturls for WordPress.com hosted blogs. According to Matt Mullenweg the wp.me shorturl is different from other services such as tiny.url or tr.im who had their 5 minutes of fame last week.
- WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world
- Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now
- These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink
- It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones
- The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around
- WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com
Other than the restriction of only being available to WP.com users, WP.me sounds like pretty much any other shorturl service to me. Most bloggers will not care about the rel="shortlink" code in the header nor will most users bother thinking long term if their links will still work in a year. But all credits to the Automattic team to cover most angles for their users and keep adding services to their platform, making WP.com better and better on an almost daily base.
Matt Mullenweg has, in an attempt to clear the confusion with themes and the GPL license they might or might not inherit from WordPress, contacted the Software Freedom Law Center, who was instrumental in creating the GPL version 3 license. The reply, which is presented as a whole in the wordpress.org blog, basically says that while CSS and images might not be “tainted” by the GPL license, the template files surely are since they load WordPress functions and rely on them to work. [Read more…]
There is a page on wordpress.org that promotes a select few premium theme marketplaces, as we reported yesterday. The only criteria is that the themes need to be GPL and provide professional support a well as give a professional impression.
I caught up with Matt Mullenweg for some quick questions about this via email. This is what he had to say. [Read more…]
WordCamp San Francisco 2009 this past weekend was a resounding success, but there is some major confusion coming from the presentation on the State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg about the “merger” of WordPress and WordPressMU.
In his presentation, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told the more than 700 attendees news about WordPress and its relatives under the Automattic umbrella, a form of stockholders report. He also announced that WordPress – the ORG part of WordPress – would be merged into WordPressMU.
Many, including Ozh of Planet Ozh, The Theme Lab, and Aaron Brazell were quick to announce their thoughts about the “merger of WordPress and WordPressMU,” misunderstanding the story they were getting across the live blogs and twit-stream from WordCamp San Francisco. [Read more…]
Now this is a huge feather in the already pretty feather-heavy WordPress hat: Wired switches from TypePad to WordPress.
We’ve switched content platforms to WordPress, which should allow for all kinds of widgety fun and games as we move our stuff into the new place and figure out where to hang things.
While at it, the Wired blogs have also gotten something of a facelift to “bring all the Wired blogs into closer sync with the main site, and with the magazine”, which sounds like a good idea.
Naturally, the WordPress Publisher Blog is reporting this, and so is Automattican Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider. Six Apart owns the TypePad service, and I bet they are a bit pissed that Wired didn’t go for Movable Type instead.
I’m happy to see that Automattic has been able to acquire WP.com, from Yahoo incidentally, who also sold the blo.gs domain to the creators of WordPress and Akismet not so long ago. Matt is thrilled, and rumor has it* that he spent a full day just typing in wp.com and watching it resolve to wordpress.com (*not confirmed).
Naturally, he blogged it as well, on the WordPress.com blog, asking the world what they should do with the new domain, and urging people to make suggestions in the comments.
My reaction to that: Whaaat?!?!
Are you mad? [Read more…]
Matt Mullenweg has announced that Automattic will be giving blo.gs, a ping service of yore, a refresh:
Yahoo! is transferring blo.gs to Automattic for safekeeping and further development. I’ve been a long-time fan of the service, and it even inspired the early WordPress feature which reordered your blogroll based on update times.
Classy move on Yahoo’s part, who obviously have no use for it.
