Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider both whom are in attendance for the LeWeb 10 conference were recently interviewed by TechCrunch reporter, Alexia Tsotsis. The interview doesn’t go into much detail but we do get a glimpse as to how things are going for Automattic as a company. WordPress.com is getting about 300 million unique pageviews a month from 30 million publishers that make up 10% of the websites on the web. In terms of revenue, Automattic is breaking even but as a company, they make a little under $1 million per month with all services combined. TechCrunch figures that this equates to $10 million a year. Perhaps it’s just me but if that is correct, that number seems pretty low considering how large WordPress.com is.
However, the best part of the interview comes down to the final question regarding any potential exit potential for the company. Their response: “Our goal’s not to be acquired“.
$10 million for a year and $1 million for a month is too low for wordpress.com, but i love their goal, because if they got acquired by some greedy corp. it will directly affect wordpress development and other free services.
Well it depends on how much they spend on the system. I rarelly see somebody talking about a site hosted in wordpress.com, while blogspot is much more popular.
Youtube is also much more popular, but had to be sold because it was costing 2 millions/month and bringing no revenue.
If they can pay its cost and keep providing free hosting, it’s great. But if they can’t and must sell, or if some AOL just wanna buy it to get (in reality, lose) its customers, then everybody would run away.
Yes I agree, these figures seem pretty low. It would be very upsetting if someone acquires them and starts charging for service. There’s always this free service vs paid service, and as for free blogging service, they are great. I have several blogs on WordPress.com and I think they’re very user-friendly and convenient.
Matt said that their focus is more on growth both for .com and .org, I believe. As a testament, I only see ads on my wp.com site if I browse via mobile (android/iphone). So basically, they don’t maximize the monetization of WP. Actually, you’ll hardly see the ads so you got to think how they earn money aside from premium services.
Congrats to them and despite all what’s said against Automattic, I feel their genuine concern for the WP community.