This announcement from WPMU.org should easily make topic list for the next show of WordPress Weekly.
First, they revisit old territory with a semi-dis to Automattic and their alleged third-party commercial cock-blocking, then the announcement of WPPlugins, the supposed app store for WordPress plugins.
Is this goodbye to free [quality] plugins? Maybe, but if this service is to catch on, it’ll take six months to a year for real adoption, so no need to freak out just yet.
The major problems WPPlugins face are: 1) plugin developers haven’t seemed to be very commercially oriented in the past, so I’m questioning if the best and most well known devs will switch over now and 2) WordPress has been in development for almost five years and thousands of free plugins have already been released. If the business strategy really wanted to success, it would have had to been to the market long before 98% of the plugins ever to exist were already created.
I guess we’ll see, but I can’t see why a developer wouldn’t want to monetize their work. This WPPlugins deal seems incredibly fair. I haven’t read the exclusivity fine print, but Incsub, the company behind this project, as well as the better known (and personally loathed) WPMUDev Premium project, only gets 10% of each sale or plugin subscription.
If the service came out a year or two ago, I would predict nothing but great success, but now, who knows? I have a feeling that the biggest predictor might be the adoption (or download) numbers of WordPress in general. If they’re rising, then the market is getting larger, which means quality (and more importantly, dependability) will begin to become more important to the “average” WordPress user. And not surprisingly, average users do equal value with price, hence their aversion to open-source technologies in the first place.
Bonus trivia:
- Will questions about these premium plugins be allowed on the wordpress.org forums?
- What will Automattic’s reaction be?
- Why didn’t Automattic create this service themselves a long time ago?
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Interesting, I think i could really catch on, especially for veteran users who are tired of wading through plugins to find “the one.” One thing I noticed that I hope they’ll change is the lack of a rating system. Perhaps I didn’t see it becasue I didn’t create an account yet and wasn’t logged in but without the ability to have user feedback, my “risk” alarm starts to fire up and I’ll be far less likely to buy anything.