The Guardian has a great article online which features numerous quotes from PollDaddy co-founder and project lead David Lenehan on various business aspects of PollDaddy. In the article which is more like an interview, we learn that the company has been cash flow positive since the beginning with revenues doubling since they’ve started. When it comes to competition, there are less polling services available now then there were when PollDaddy launched. The biggest reason for selling to Automattic?
“It was more down to Automattic as a company.” said David Lenehan, now product lead for PollDaddy at Automattic. “We weren’t fussed about selling at the time and had lots of people that could have approached us that wouldn’t have raised our interest. But Automattic then only had 20 staff and an exciting product including WordPress.com, and our software was used a lot – 30-40% of our users were using WordPress.
“It was an opportunity to become part of something bigger and more exciting. It was the right offer at the right time – and Lehman Brothers was collapsing at that time, so it seemed a good idea.”
What a great acquisition that turned out to be for Automattic. Not only is PollDaddy still steaming along, but it’s a platform agnostic service meaning it’s not tied specifically to WordPress in order to use it. While I’m a big fan of Lester Chans WP-Polls plugin, the fact that he is concentrating on other aspects of his life right now has me considering polling alternatives such as PollDaddy. The only problem I have is that I need to leave WP-Polls in place in order to keep the data associated with it. If I could some how find a migration tool from WP-Polls into PollDaddy, I’m pretty sure I’d make the switch. Let me know if you know of one. I’m also curious to hear your thoughts on the PollDaddy service.
I must say it’s a good acquisition..if that’s the right word to use.
Since the company is still small. Automatics should give Polldaddy lots of opportunities to grow if integrate successfully. I use the word “if” as I have seen many companies fall apart after acquisition. Hopefully not for this case.
Eric Carlson
Publisher,
I’ve looked at their services and they seem ridiculously expensive for what they offer (a script, basically). I wanted their quiz funtionality, for my free educational site with about 700,000 page views a month… that would cost me $900 a year. In the end I used a free quiz plugin and wrote a more elegant css for it.
Well, you’re right. If a vote in a poll counts as one response, then the 100 responses per month limit for the free account is just too limiting. I could get 100 responses in a week with a certain poll. In the end, doing something in-house or finding a plugin that works and is actively developed appears to be a better way of handling polls.
Awesome! I was unaware of polldaddy, but after this article I may end up using their services!
I used PollDaddy for a while but it just became too expensive. I ended up doing pretty much what Josh did and rolled my own.
Have you thought about putting your polling plugin on the plugin repository? Does yours have the same feature set as WP-Polls?
I use Polldaddy polls multiple times a week. They allow me to do polls on my daily ‘Colbert Report’ episode guides. I’ve never used the paid services because I haven’t needed to. I would love to have access to some of the data exporting services, but since I’m not using the data to increase income, it seems silly to pay $200/month for what amounts to a vanity search.
$200/Year, not month.
Does that mean you’ve never crossed the 100 responses per month barrier? Seems like that would be pretty easy to do, especially on a larger community oriented site like yours.
With polls, you can have as many responses to the poll as you want (http://polldaddy.com/features-polls/). I do four polls a week, four weeks a month, and average 30-50 responses per poll.
I see, I was looking at their price plans and the free account says 100 responses. Looks like that semantics is for surveys and not polls. If that’s the case, that’s awesome
Yeah, that’s unclear, but a “response” only applies to surveys and quizzes. Polls have no limits, but they only ask one question, basically.
In a way, this is the wordpress dot org VS dot com debate, afresh.
Is it better to :
– rely on someone doing everything for you, for free but with a paying option,
or is it better to
– put our shoulders to the wheel, face a certain degree of complexity and spend more time on it, but in exchange have everything for free and own our data without relying on a third-party ?
That’s an open question.
It is indeed an open question but the more I think about it, the more I think the second option has more benefits than the first.
In some cases, I agree with you. In other cases, I don’t.
The basic difference is one of time and skill level. Are your coding skills up to the task of creating and maintaining your own solution to the problem? Is it worth your time to do that? If the answer is yes, then the second solution is definitely the way to go. If not, however, then a third party solution is a perfectly acceptable choice.
The worst of PollDady is when a admin web, who create a poll dont fix finne the poll, and one visit anonimously can edit the poll o increase the visits with only remove cookies 🙁