WordPress Funding- The Real Winners and Losers

by victorkaramalis on January 26, 2008

by Victor Karamalis Photo Taken by Brian Solis via Flickr
Matt Mullenweg, Glenda Bautista, and I at a GigaOm party last year

Earlier this week, Auttomattic announced that it raised roughly $29 million in funding. This is an excellent move (investment wise) for True Ventures and the New York Times who chipped in with funding as well. The real winners are the bloggers that already use WordPress (including sites like GigaOm, CNN, Fox, and Bubblicious) and with its continued innovation that the open source community fosters for the platform. No doubt, this will add more platform capability features and functionality to the already exploding plug-in and theme rich platform.

Since there are winners, there need to be losers in this as well. The big losers are all the other blogging platforms (and its users). Competitors B2 Evolution and Expression Engine have found ways to differentiate themselves (and they have). This leaves with SIXAPART struggling a bit. Although SIXAPART is the granddaddy of blogging and fresh from its recent sell of Live Journal, they are betting big on getting those in the blogging community to move over to their own platforms like Movable Type, Type Pad, and the newer VOX.com. I do like the enhancements made in Movable Type 4. It has a built-in social networking functionality but it may hurt more than it will help because there are many people that I have spoken with here in the Valley from entrepreneurs to VC’s that have been getting fatigued by too much online social networking sites.

I see this as the classic VHS vs. Beta scenario. That face-off ended with VHS on top. Its success came down to which format was more beneficial for the end user. Translating this in the blogosphere, the winning case leans toward WordPress due to the fact that it is search engine optimization friendly and its ability to be tweaked by an open source development community (approximately 10,000) in a popular scripting language (PHP). The money will be used to add more engineers to develop newer product offerings like Gravatar and Akismet.

All I have to say to Matt is ‘have another Brewski; you’ve earned it.’