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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