Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what it’s like to run WordPress’ and Tumblr’s parent company
] What’s interesting at Automattic is there’s no internal email. I get a handful of emails a year from my colleagues. Everything happens on these internal blogs. What that means is we have essentially an organizational blockchain where every single decision going back to 2007 is on one of these internal blogs. You can find how every piece of code works, or every business decision, or every logo. Everything is in there somewhere.
Let’s talk about WordPress. It is a giant. It is perhaps an overlooked giant, as you were alluding to earlier. You did just roll out this big, new upgrade to it calledAt the company, it’s probably about 500 people working on WordPress, but for every WordPress release, like version 5.9 that came out in December, we list all the contributors. People employed by Automattic are typically 10% or less of the contributors.That’s one of the cool things about the WordPress community.
I think you might be our first open-source CEO on the show, depending on when this runs. How do you manage that? WordPress is a big open-source project. Anybody can go download WordPress and start a site. You’ve got nothing to do with it. No revenue flows to you. Anybody can modify it and do whatever they want with it. Then there’s what they contribute back to the main open-source code so that you can release new versions. You guys manage that. Then you have a business next to it.
There’s this plug-in called Akismet. It keeps spam off your site. It’s the best anti-spam, web anti-spam system on the web. A lot of people don’t know, but it’s actually the first code I wrote after leaving my job.The first commercial thing we created before Wordpress.com was actually Akismet. It works really well. It’s free for personal use, and then paid for commercial use. It’s kind of an honor system. We don’t really police it that much. It’s a Robin Hood business model.
I think that’s your bubble, if I’m totally honest. That’s what’s cool about the web: We can live in a bubble and that can seem like the whole thing. One thing I would explicitly try to do in 2022 is make the web weirder.One of the fun things about working on both WordPress and Tumblr now is they both provide a lot of freedom.
There’s people that are sharing. That’s really, really exciting to me because it’s kind of like the personal web. It’s different, it’s unique. I go to a Medium article, or even a Substack article, and I read the article and I just remember Medium or Substack. I actually forget the author because the sites all kind of look the same.
Those are still great services, by the way. I give Amazon a big portion of my paycheck. I love it. I actually would argue that it’s making the world a better place, but we still need an open-source alternative to serve as a check and balance in the free market towards these successful companies. . We’re putting Virgil Abloh-inspired, very limited drops of cool high-quality stuff. We were able to launch that on WooCommerce in about two weeks, which shows you can really do anything.
The average person on Shopify is paying $1,200 per year. That’s really expensive. It doesn’t need to be that expensive. It can be one-tenth, and then someday one-hundredth of that, to have all that functionality. WooCommerce is one-tenth that today, and it’s going to get cheaper and cheaper every year.But no one does that. Most people are paying you $120.WooCommerce is also different from WordPress in that WooCommerce is wholly owned and run by Automattic. It’s not primarily a larger community.
WooCommerce stores who advertise on Facebook probably were impacted, but the reason why people go to WordPress, or WooCommerce, is to build a direct relationship with their customers and not be entirely dependent on or mediated by Google, Facebook, et cetera. So they build mailing lists. WordPress has the best SEO in the world and WooCommerce inherits that. These WooCommerce stores are findable on an organic search, not just paid search.
I’ll tell you a stat most people don’t realize. Half of all users who sign up for WordPress.com every day are there to blog.To be honest, even internally, we assumed everyone was coming to us for CMS features, and I think we over-indexed on that more business-y side that you just described. That’s also because we thought more revenue was coming, but when we sliced the data differently, we actually found that more than half of signups were there primarily to blog.
I think Verizon is super conservative. If you look at apps like Twitter and Twitch, they actually do have an astounding amount of adult content, but they do it in a way that is compatible with Apple’s rules. So I think Verizon took an extremely conservative approach to try to get rid of even borderline things — things that I would call art — from the app. They did it in a way that penalized a lot of legitimate users.
Yes. Still true. Tumblr was in the news in December. We were scrambling right before Christmas because Apple came to us — you probably saw where we had to ban these random tags. The app store review process can be very inconsistent. Sometimes something you’ve done for years and years, they’ll come to you and say, “That’s not allowed anymore.” Or, “We searched for this search term and now your app is banned unless you make these drastic changes very quickly right before Christmas.
Hmm. You don’t hear about this stuff with Google very much. So I will say that the Play Store is a lot more consistent in their application of things. Honestly, Apple has a tough job here, so it’s not dissimilar to trying to moderate user-generated content. It’s that they’re moderating hundreds of thousands of apps and the team that does that — I have no idea how big it is, but let’s call it at least 1,000 people. I literally have no information. That’s just a guess.
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