WordCamp Miami 2012 presentation on the business of WordPress ecosystem.

1. The WordPress
Ecosystem in 2012
Brian Breslin
@brianbreslin
http://brianbreslin.com
Saturday, February 18, 12

2. Market Size
Saturday, February 18, 12

3. Market Size
71 MILLION Blogs worldwide
~35M on Wordpress.com <- Future target
Self Hosted 36M+ <- Current target market
Saturday, February 18, 12

4. Ecosystem Size*
*Back of napkin math
36Million sites self hosted. Assume average
user hosts ~2 wp installs
18M hosting accounts @ Average cost
between $5-10 each
18M * $7.50 = $135M/m in hosting alone
Premium theme market ~$30M/year
Saturday, February 18, 12

5. Ecosystem Size*
*Back of napkin math
Total market size of all WordPress specific
sales: roughly $100M/year
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6. Top Revenue Streams
Themes
Plugins
Hosting
Support/Services
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7. Biggest Players
Automattic
WooThemes
Envato/Themeforest
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8. PressBackup.com
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9. My experiences
PressBackup
Launched Feb 2011
~20,000 downloads
~0.5% Paying users
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10. PressBackup Lessons
Plugin discovery is still hard
Free to premium conversion is difficult
Cheap/free mentality difficult to overcome
Free version necessary for distribution
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11. PressBackup Customer
Sources
75% of all users originate on Wordpress.org
plugin repository
60% of paying users originate from organic
search - 20% from PPC
SEO/Search engines 2nd biggest traffic
source
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12. How the ecosystem
could improve
“App Store” for premium themes/plugins
WordPress.com Premium theme market grows
(28 themes at moment)
More marketplaces
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13. What’s next?
Wordpress evolves as a platform (API)
Wordpress evolves as a CMS
Wordpress
Saturday, February 18, 12

14. Brian Breslin
http://brianbreslin.com
@brianbreslin
Saturday, February 18, 12