WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg Speaks!
This week, I had lunch with one of the nicest young Web entrepreneurs around the scene, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.
We use a custom WordPress.com installation for this site, which has worked out well for us, and the start-up also hosts AllThingsD.com. We also got a very nice hoodie.
In all seriousness, the company started as an open-source blogging software project at WordPress.org with Mullenweg as founding developer, while WordPress.com is for-profit and is run by Mullenweg and others at a start-up called Automattic.
Mullenweg came to San Francisco from his hometown of Houston to work on WordPress and other projects for CNET in 2004. He left a year later to work full-time on the development of WordPress.
It and others like it quickly rode the wave of an ever-growing trend of self-publishing, which has been increasingly embraced by both the single person writing about their cat to the large-scale media companies looking to develop more dynamic properties online.
WordPress and Automattic (which also runs Akismet, an anti-comment and trackback spam software service) has been the frequent target of takeover speculation.
But, while Automattic has reportedly considered those options, as well as hooking up with other companies like Sphere (which was just bought for $35 million in cash by AOL [TWX]), Mullenweg seems just as determined to build out his simple publishing platform, by adding ad networks and all sorts of bells and whistles to the offerings.
In fact, WordPress competitor Six Apart did just that last week with its acquisition of the New York-based ad, design and consulting services firm Apperceptive.
So I will bet Mullenweg probably has some news of his own, when he gives a short speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this morning.
We’ll see, but in this video, Mullenweg talks with BoomTown–after we admit to an obvious man crush on him–about the progress in the blog-publishing arena and where it is all going.
Here’s the video:
Comments
Great video subject. One word of advice on the video production front, I counted 9 “rights” and 17 “uh-huhs & mm-huh’s). It’s annoying. Kara, just listen and let the subject speak.
Posted by alexander katzeff at April 26th, 2008 at 12:12 amWordpress is a fantastic achievement. I really like the 2 sides:
1. Free Open Source software anyone can download and install
2. Commercial hosted version of the same software so people don’t have download and install but will have to pay.
I would like Matt to talk more about how they support the commercial version (hosted) financially as it might help other open source projects.
It looks to me like they derive revenue from:
1. Inserting Google adverts into hosted blogs
2. Charging for spam protection
3. Upgrades
I think no 1 is fine, although it was a bit of a surprise when I saw Google ads on one of my old blog posts - I didn’t realise upfront that they were going to do that. I would suspect that most bloggers don’t realise that wordpress is running ads on their older blog posts.
No 2 is a bit more of a problem. If they are trying to develop a really good open source product, they should include spam protection as part of that product and not have it as a commercial extra. The akismet service seems to do a fair job of spam protection but there should be an alternative (e.g. a CAPTCHA) for those who don’t want to pay.
I notice that all things d requires registration to post comments. Is this because they don’t want to pay for akismet or because it doesn’t do a good enough job?
I think wordpress is a real success story for the open source movement. I think they may have a business model other open source projects could imitate although I’m a little worried they could be deliberately not developing spam protection in the open source product in order to sell the commercial solution.
Posted by Chris Paton at April 26th, 2008 at 6:13 pmWordPress has it detractors in that it’s method or refreshing is more of a drain on systems than Movable Type. The processes are totally different. Yet WordPress continues to dominate and expand in all phases of online publishing says alot about the versatility of the format.
Posted by Rich Naran at September 6th, 2008 at 5:57 pm