Wordpress On a Roll
When someone wanted to start a blog, the default for a free tool used to be Blogger.com. This status is increasingly being assumed by Wordpress.com (even my brother, Sean, is ready to jump into blogging using Wordpress). According to TechCrunch, Wordpress.com now hosts 300,000 blogs, which receive 1.6 million pages views a day and 14.2 million unique visitors a month - double the amount of traffic since May. For months, Wordpress domo Matt Mullenweg has talked about how his company, Automattic, planned to leverage Wordpress' success by offering premium services. This strategy has started to recently emerge with the introduction an upgrade called Custom CSS, which lets users change the look of their blogs. It's a small step in a strategy that will be a challenge to implement given Wordpress has established itself as a free rather than fee service. To its credit, Wordpress is involving the community with a paid upgrades thread to solicit ideas. Some of the early ideas included Javascript, AdSense, statistical/analytical tools, personal domain names and more hard storage. I've been using Wordpress since last December for All Nortel, All the Time, and really like its simplicity and ease of use. What kind of upgrades would I pay for? Well, Javascript would be a start because it would provide the flexibility to introduce services that Wordpress doesn't offer such as advanced analytics. How much would I pay? Perhaps $1 to $5 a month. It will, no doubt, be interesting to see Wordpress unveils in the coming months, and how many users are actually willing to pay for fee-based services.
Note: For more on Wordpress' first premium service, check out Blog Herald. Om Malik and Niall Kennedy also have a podcast on how new advertising networks are starting to emerge, including Wordpress' recent experimentation with contextual advertising.
