WordPress isn’t a commercial success…wait, what?

Read this.  Then come back.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.

WordPress.com Blogs Garnered 23 Billion Pageviews in 2010

It’s the last paragraph the bugs me.

The five-year-old company may be experiencing remarkable growth, but it has yet to become a commercial success. The startup reportedly makes around $1 million per month from premium and hosting services, an inconsequential figure for a company that plays such a central role in web publishing.

Automattic makes $12 million a year spending most of their time developing free software and yet, they aren’t a commercial success?  What? Seriously, what? Matt & crew are some of the biggest and most public advocates for open source and the GPL.  Monetization, while obviously a concern, is not a focus, the focus is creating a great application that millions of people use daily for free.  $12 million a year for a team of maybe a couple dozen full-time employees?  Sounds successful to me.  The fact that they aren’t raking in the dough like Microsoft or Apple is a choice not a byproduct of failed marketing, and were they to go that route, I doubt they’d have the market share that most of that article reveals.

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