The Challenge

Rambles and Riff Raff about all this and that

On Wordpress Theme Market place

Published by Esteban Glas on November 3rd, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Blog Design, Blogs, Business

I was there. I listened. I didn’t blog about it. This was a conscious decision. I’m not a reporter, don’t want to be one and, quite frankly, it’s not in me at all. The Marketplace idea seemed something Automattic would like to disclose more “officially”. Now that Matt has posted on it, I feel I can speak freely.

I regard the idea of implementing models to monetize a site or service that are not based upon omnipresent ads as a very smart move, at the right time. As bubble 2.0 keeps growing, chances are that those companies that are smart enough to broaden their income methods have a better chance to survive.

Would I buy a theme? Not really, but I’m not quite the average WordPress user. A great deal of my work life turns around blogs; not just writing, but planning, developing and maintaining them. But that is not the question.

The thing is: who wins with this sort of initiatives? (My guess is Automattic has more ideas like this one on the pipeline, and probably some other companies as well). Easy answer: everybody. Designers can make an extra buck. Wordpress.com get’s some cash. The user get’s choices. Of course the implementation, ease of use and diversity of themes will determine the success, but as an abstract idea I can really see it working. It might not be “huge” but it’ll work. And it is not ads, and that is, once again, a good thing.

The other brilliant part of it is making the themes GPL-licensed elsewhere. With a personal inclination towards Open Source I like this Idea and would love to see is turn into profits for WordPress. It would be one more piece of evidence that Open Source is viable as base for business models and not just “hippy-geek-thing” done by freetards.

The abstract observation out of all this is: Although technology deletes boundaries every single day, there is one that remains too hard to overcome: language.

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