While I was in San Francisco I sat down to talk to Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic Inc - the company set up to leverage the popular open source blogging tool Wordpress. One of their main projects is WordPress.com, described as "a more limited version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained." It's pretty much the equivalent of TypePad, the hosted blogging service offered by Automattic's main competitor SixApart.
The competition with SixApart was stepped up today when Toni announced on his blog a partnership with enterprise RSS vendor KnowNow, for a new product called KnowNow WordPress Enterprise Edition (KWEE). It's an enterprise version of Wordpress and comes just a month after SixApart announced Movable Type Enterprise 1.5, which we profiled on Read/WriteWeb. Toni told me that KWEE is an enterprise package of Wordpress MU (the multi-user version of Wordpress) - with additional enterprise functionality bundled in. So for example KWEE comes with LDAP, Automattic's spam solution Akismet and a stats package. KnowNow will market the product to their existing base of enterprise customers - and any improvements that KnowNow makes to the Wordpress product itself, will be released back as open source.
I asked Toni will it be a hosted service? He said it will be available as both a hosted service (by KnowNow) or customers can install it on their own servers.
As far as Wordpress.com goes, Toni reeled off some impressive stats. It gets 18 million unique visitors per month and 70 M page views. There are over 480,000 blogs hosted on wordpress.com. He also said there are an estimated 1-2 million Wordpress installations that are self-hosted. Toni told me the fact that wordpress.com is ad-free is a big part of the reason why people use it.
I asked Toni how wordpress.com compares to Typepad. He said that Typepad has similar traffic to wp.com, although he says wp.com is about to pass Typepad (at least according to Alexa). Here is the latest Alexa chart:
Toni said there is a developer ecosystem around wordpress, which was done without putting commercialism around it - e.g. he notes that themes have links back to the designers. He also told me there is a lot of innovation happening in the wordpress platform in general - for example the plugins. The fact that Wordpress.org is open source is also a factor in the growth of the product, said Toni.
Of course you will hear a different story from SixApart, but my general impression is that Wordpress has the advantage in innovation - but TypePad is seen as a slicker and more user-friendly product for the masses.
One of the more interesting aspects of wordpress.com is its international usage. While english is the number 1 language used, there are a multitude of other languages supported - and Wordpress users are encouraged to translate more. Spanish is the second most popular language currently - and indeed 4 of the top 10 Wordpress.com blogs are Spanish.
But while international support is expanding, Wordpress isn't immune to the problems of operating in China - where Wordpress is blocked.
One of the more promising areas of growth in Wordpress is widgets, or mini web apps that Wordpress users can plug into their blog. As of now there are 247 widgets. Around 15-20 of these are available in the wordpress.com service. Toni told me that most widgets are created by external developers. Basically this involves developing a Wordpress plugin and then widgetizing it in an HTML wrapper.
It's pretty plain that Automattic is taking on SixApart with both the Enterprise Edition and the continued growth and expansion of wordpress.com. Right now SixApart has the lead in marketing and probably resources, but Wordpress is a strong innovator and has an open source platform to attract developers. This little battle is far from over and it'll be interesting to watch it unfold!
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Entrevista a Mullenweb en eventoblog06 (EBE06) celebrado en Sevilla (España) este fin de semana:17 a 19 de Noviembre.
Posted by: eraser | November 20, 2006 1:18 PMEntenderéis cómo cuida Matt a sus clientes?
Entrevista a Mullenweg en eventoblog06 (EBE06) celebrado en Sevilla (España) este fin de semana:17 a 19 de Noviembre.
Posted by: eraser | November 20, 2006 1:19 PMEntenderéis cómo cuida Matt a sus clientes?
It doesn't seem particularly fair to compare Wordpress's explosive growth to Typepad, since Typepad is a pay service and Wordpress is completely free (and ad-free). It's only natural that Wordpress is growing quicker, but Typepad is making money on every blog.
Comparing Wordpress to Blogger would be a fairer comparison. http://tinyurl.com/ygl4o6
Posted by: Andy Baio | November 20, 2006 2:07 PMBoth wordpress and mt lack any real social networking functions that make an enterprise blogging platform really useful. Here's a demo of what I mean.
http://www.enterprise20apps.com/blogging
Posted by: jwilde | November 20, 2006 3:10 PMIn regard to traffic numbers, it's probably worth mentioning that TypePad blogs can also appear at *.blogs.com URLs, that almost all of the most popular TypePad blogs (such as those for the Washington Post or Wired News) use their own URLs, and that all TypePad users can use their own domain name for their sites.
There's also that little matter that all TypePad users are allowed to make money with their sites, and can password protect their sites with no additional charge no matter how many users they share the password with.
I don't honestly know much about KnowNow, but given that they once had much of the original Pyra team working for them but let them go, have an uneven record of supporting open source, and haven't had much success with high-priced blogging software before, I'm glad they at least seem to be embracing a lot of the Enterprise 2.0 ideas that SuiteTwo is helping popularize. Competition's good for everybody.
Posted by: Anil | November 20, 2006 5:46 PMAndy, I agree, WordPress and TypePad may not be comparable, but Blogger and Wordpress can't be comparable either. One is a Google product and has the advantages of it, see Orkut, Flickr, del.icio.us; do you think they would be in the same place if they weren't Google or Yahoo. Nothing can shadow the tremendous rise of Wordpress.
jwilde, what about Vox? This is what SixApart exactly working on. They're creating social networking concept around the blogging - which is a very smart strategy, IMHO. MyBlogLog is also somehow tackling the same problem.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | November 20, 2006 7:29 PMAs a developer using Movable Type I can't see Wordpress going far for enterprise use. No support doesn't help it any. I have a number of important support/how to fix questions in the forum, all unresolved and over 6 months old.
At least with Six Apart I get a response within hours usually, certainly within a day. Wordpress is ok as long as you aren't a developer and want to use it basically as is, or common customizations, but whats the point of saving a couple dollars and losing so much functionality? For a business "free" isn't always a good deal.
Posted by: Bruce Prochnau | November 20, 2006 8:34 PMMaybe I missed it somewhere. But when is this going to come out? Or is it available now?
Posted by: Marc | November 20, 2006 9:28 PMMarc: the product is available for pilot customers now.
What's pretty exciting is that we're talking about customers who are thinking about deploying tens or even hundreds of thousands of blogs inside their companies. WordPress can scale to those numbers, and KnowNow can service those types of customers, which is why we think this will be a good partnership.
Posted by: Toni | November 20, 2006 10:46 PMAndy's point is spot on, and it's also true what Anil said about the blogs.com domain. Not to take anything away from Wordpress, it is remarkable that Wordpress has grown so quickly. Their traffic combined with the no-ads, no-splogs suggests that the quality of their content and their bloggers is very high to have grown that quickly.
Personally I love the Wordpress software. I also use it in a development enviroment and have never had a problem with the support, and find the plugin library to be more suited to my needs and easier to install and maintain etc. I'm about to embark on a significant project trying WordpressMU, I'll be very interested to see how it stacks up against Movable Type.
Posted by: Franklin | November 20, 2006 11:30 PMHi Toni,
I understand that it's hard to be exact with a quote snippet, but isn't it more correct to say that "wordpress has really, really unobtrusive ads" rather than "no-ads"?
http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/09/06/on-ads/
Just yesterday someone dropped by my blog and commented that it was funny that an adsense ad for "installing IE" was showing up on a page that gave instructions on how to uninstall IE 7.
Posted by: engtech | November 21, 2006 7:46 AMhttp://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/11/17/i-hate-internet-explorer-7-uninstall-guide/#comment-4297
It's important to note that WordPress.com and the WordPress platform are not the same thing. You can take the WordPress platform and plug it in (for free) where ever you want -- and it's terribly easy to do. WordPress.com allows you to not even worry about the five minute install or finding your own host. You can't customize your blog as much that way, but it's awfully hassle-free.
The chart, above, compares WordPress.com to TypePad.com (just those two sites). It doesn't begin to add in the users of the WordPress platform, which, I can tell you, works wonderfully, especially for the part-time blogger.
Posted by: Jonathan | November 21, 2006 8:15 AMWordPress.com allows people to map their own domains as well, which our highest-traffic blogs have done, so there is a dampening effect on both Alexa graphs. However if anyone wants a true apples-to-apples comparison, ask Six Apart to publish their stats like we do every month. I'm sure their numbers will be bigger, so they have nothing to be scared of.
While it's interesting to compare Typepad to WordPress.com, since WordPress.com was several years late to the game, the more interesting comparison is actually to Movable Type (+Enterprise).
The same code that powers 480,000 blogs is what enterprise customers get when they use KWEE (or MU). Movable Type (+Enterprise) customers are getting an entirely separate codebase from Typepad, Vox, Livejournal -- a codebase which, judging from the number of web hosts that discourage MT and the number of people and businesses switching daily to WordPress, hasn't been shown to scale very well without serious voodoo.
Posted by: Matt | November 21, 2006 8:28 AMHowever if anyone wants a true apples-to-apples comparison, ask Six Apart to publish their stats like we do every month.
I find it flattering that you think it's more likely we'll be open with the community than your partners at KnowNow will. Here's some detailed stats about the open-source-powered LiveJournal community.
Posted by: Anil | November 21, 2006 10:07 AMActually Bruce, WordPress is making inroads into the enterprise. The New York Times, for example, runs WordPress for all of its blogs. Plenty of start-ups use it as well: PodTech.net and GigaOM.com, for example.
And now you can now pay for enterprise-level support,.
Posted by: tiffany | November 21, 2006 2:36 PMengtech: you are correct, we are currently serving (very few) ads on wordpress.com (never on people's home pages). There are also several VIP blogs who serve their own ads. Not sure what exactly I said to Richard that he quoted. Usually I talk about the fact that most free blog services slap lots of ads onto user's blogs to squeeze out as much profit as possible. We don't and people appreciate it.
Posted by: Toni | November 21, 2006 3:34 PMThanks for sharing Anil, LJ's stats are interesting, though most of the data is buried in a text file and postsbyday seems to stop in 2003. However it has no information about traffic, so doesn't really solve the problem posed above, and it would be interesting to see a similar or better level of transparency from the products that Six Apart developed rather than acquired.
Most of what I said above doesn't apply to LiveJournal, being an open source project like WordPress MU people can (and do) run code the same or very similar to what powers the real site. But, as far as I know, you aren't promoting that Livejournal to enterprises so I'm not sure how it's relevant to this discussion.
Posted by: Matt | November 21, 2006 11:05 PMI think this new product will complete package for corporate blogging. I hope they'll listen expert/professionnal community for feedback :)
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