There’s a great conversation at WPMU.org about how to make money using Wordpress MU – James starts by noting that advertising doesn’t cover the hosting costs for a massively successful site, and goes into the various other ways in which they derive revenue, including selling extra features to paid users and selling custom plugins (that are not released under the GPL). In response, Jason acknowledges that WPMU is inherently costly to run and agrees that there must be a revenue tsream, and then goes on to argue that WPMU is really a service, not a product. Therefore to make money with WPMU, he reasons, you must provide a value-added service relative to the big free hosts like wordpress.com – such as custom themes. James replies with a lengthy argument defending the decision not to release plugins under the GPL.
I don’t have much to add aside from noting that since themes have long been released without GPL, there’s no reason that plugins should be any different, especially with themes like Thesis which are “frameworks” that really blur the line between a theme and a plugin. The same can be argued for Prologue, which I use as the front end to my WPMU install at Talk Islam. The “core functions” of WP are never used in themes or plugins, so I don’t think that argument applies (think about it – why would you want to duplicate core WP functionality? why would you even need to?)
Of course, part of the problem for monetization is that you are a victim of your own succcess. James’ monthly costs for the Edublogs network are assuredly far greater than mine for Talk Islam – I can only aspire to a fraction of his success (especially since I am not running Talk Islam as a business. not yet anyway). As such Talk Islam has only a handful of user blogs – most of the activity is on the front page (where the Prologue theme gives it a dynamic, Twitter-esque feel). My goal for Talk Islam is to incorporate the Buddypress functions and ultimately create a framework for a “community platform” that would be in a sense the successor to the Daily Kos style blog community, replicating many of the features but discarding things that are broken in my opinion (such as the way the recommended diaries list is dominated by a clique of the same voices and the same topics, with very rare original and fresh perspectives). It should be noted that Shai Sachs, a very talented Drupal hacker, is working on a drupal-based blog infrastructure project for the progressive political blogsphere, but I personally believe that wordpress MU is a better platform. With Talk Islam as a prototype, we can envision a package that already includes the buddypress integration and standard theme for frontpage and user blogs that an aspiring admin could simply download and have ready to go out of the box.
The real question for monetization is the scale. How many WPMU installs are on the scale of Edublogs? Very few, I wager – but there are probably thousands like mine where the entire install can be run off a standard Dreamhost account. At that scale, Adsense ads can indeed cover hosting costs and even a modest profit on the side – not enough to pay rent, but maybe enough for cable television. Or a Starbucks addiction.
I think therefore a model for monetization presents itself. Instead of trying to monetize a single WPMU install, you monetize a packaged installation that you distribute. That installation can have Adsense code sharing so that half the revenue from ads goes to the package developer (or all if the installer doesn’t have an adsense account, there would be a box for them to paste their adsense publisher ID if they have one). For any given WPMU install the revenue will be quite modest, probably on the order of a few dollars a month. But suppose that the package was installed a hundred times? a thousand? Especially since it isn’t you who are paying the hosting fees, its the person installing the package.
Of course this means we have only punted the monetization issue downstream. But for a small WPMU site operator, recouping hosting costs is a lot easier than for a big operation like Edublogs. Users can be asked for donations, charged fees for extra features, etc just as James and Jason described in their posts. These revenue sources will be much more lucrative at the smaller scale.
As a business model, none of the above really helps James out, unfortunately 
But then again, what if individual schools ran their own WPMU microsites using Edublogs software? (actually, they do.) In a sense the strategy above can be leveraged regardless of your size. All things considered, I’d rather be in James’ position of being too big
This intriguing article for web entrepreneurs has a lot of useful information in it – particularly the interesting metric for assessing a companies value: 10 x (revenue – cost). However, in the course of the discussion he also makes an intriguing point about Google:
Google has one incredibly amazing business – keyword advertising. It relies on its own search service and deals with other search services and content partners for the audience that drives the keyword business. If you stripped that business out of Google, you’d probably have a business that has gross revenues of $20bn, net revenues of $13bn, and operating profits of $8bn to $10bn. That business is worth the approximately $100bn of market value that Google has right now. Everything else is valued at zero because it has a lot of costs and no revenue. Could Google unlock a lot of value by giving up on everything else they are doing? Maybe not, but they probably wouldn’t lose much value either. I am not suggesting they do that, by the way. But again, I just want to make a point.
That’s a fascinating point. It should be noted that everything Google does that isn’t directly related to search and advertising is essentially a distraction, and that shows: Feedburner has been moribund after it’s acquisition, YouTube can’t make a dime, and Gmail for all it’s wonderfulness is still labeled as beta. Even properties that are actively innovating, like Google Maps, Picasa, and Blogger, are still not earning any revenue for Google and are being actively competed against by Microsoft and open source software.
Of course, what would happen to all those projects if they weren’t subsidized by the web advertising business? In some ways, their very presence forces the competition to innovate. But in the looming economic clouds ahead, maybe the golden era has ended and everyone, even Google, has to abide by the rule that cash flow is king.
(via retweet of @TimOreilly from @JoeTrippi)
Among the inaugural festivities, the official web site of the White House underwent a transition of its own. The site is now built around a central blog, which is a presidential first and a definite sign of the times. The first post lays out the purpose of the blog in detail:
Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration’s online programs will put citizens first. Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:
Communication – Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates from the President and his administration so you can be sure to know about major announcements and decisions.
Transparency – President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.
Participation – President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.
We’d also like to hear from you — what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know.
I think that the key here is that the WH website remains an irgan of Executive Branch government and is not just another blog in the standard, political/technology sense. The Communication role is of course obvious, but the Transparency and Participation are also key. Posting executive orders to the web site is a great start, and allowing the public to review and comment on legislation before it gets to the President’s desk is going to really open the legislative process to the public in an innovative and rigorous way.
It’s interesting to see that a lot of technology experts don’t seem to understand the civic context of the purpose of the WH blog. For example, Dave Winer complains,
The White House should send us to places where our minds will be nourished with new ideas, perspectives, places, points of view, things to do, ways we can make a difference. It must take risks, because that is reality — we’re all at risk now — hugely.
I don’t advocate a blogging host like the Obama campaign website. There are already plenty of places to host blogs. But I do want the White House to be a public space, where new thinking from all over the world meets other new thinking. A flow distributor. A two-way briefing book for the people and the government.
We need the minds of industry, education, health care, government, people from all walks of life, to connect. It doesn’t have to be whitehouse.gov, but why not, why wait?
I think this critique is unfair – partly because by publicizing executive orders and legislation, the public minds Dave talks about will have unprecedented access to the inner workings of the executive branch. By using the blog as a central distribution point, it already is the two-way briefing book he talks about.
What the WH site should not be, however, is a “public space”. The two-way flow needs to be of absolute highest SNR, which anyone who has spent even ten minutes online can attest is fundamentally incompatible with an open forum. The flow of information in both directions must be structured and controlled for maximum efficiency. If instead WH.gov becomes another home to the constant stream of garbage that spews over most public fora on the web, then one, the public will not be well-served by having to wade through the muck to find the information of genuine civic interest; and two, the very concept of an open and transparent portal into the inner workings of government will be discredited, and that we above all must not allow to happen. WH.gov is a courageous experiment and we must not let it fail.
It should be noted that the official WhiteHouse YouTube channel does allow comments. Since YouTube is not a government site, there isn’t the same requirement of decorum and civic sensibility, so a free-for-all can be tolerated.
Related – see Patrick Ruffini, Ars Technica, and TechCrunch for further comments on the WH.gov blog from a technological perspective. Also see Democracy Arsenal and Open Left for brief commentary from a political perspective. Finally, Read/Write Web has a nice 12-year retrospective on the evolution of the WH.gov website through the past several Presidencies.
Building on the venerable Recent Posts plugin by Ron and Andrea, I have created an extended version that offers a lot more user control over output, including gravatar support. The basic features are:
- excludes posts on main blog (blog ID = 1)
- excludes first posts (Hello, world) on user blogs (post ID = 1)
- option to show gravatar support (24px). Gravatar links to posts by user on their blog.
- option to show post excerpt. User can specify excerpt length with extra argument. Option to capitalize 1st five words of excerpt for readability.
- option to show post author name
- option to show post date
- option to show post comment count
- all dispay options can be selectively toggled on or off using a single bitmask parameter, permitting very flexible and customizable usage (256 possible configurations!)
- numerous other display and formatting options can be easily edited in source code using global vars
The argument list:
- $how_many: how many recent posts are being displayed
- $how_long: time frame to choose recent posts from (in days)
- $optmask: bitmask for various display options (default: 255)
- 1; // gravatar
- 2; // date
- 4; // author name
- 8; // comment count
- 16; // blog name
- 32; // post name
- 64; // post excerpt
- 128; // excerpt capitalization
- $exc_size: size of excerpt in words (default: 30)
- $begin_wrap: start html code (default: <li class=”ahp_recent-posts”>)
- $end_wrap: end html code to adapt to different themes (default: </li>)
To use the bitmask option, simply add the numeric codes for the display options you want together. For example, suppose you only want gravatar, post name, and date – then the bitmask would be 1+2+32 = 35. Using a bitmask in this way, you can turn on or off any combination of display options above, using only a single function argument.
The latest version (0.6) of this plugin is at WPMUDEV with a more complete description, installation instructions, screenshot, and sample function call. You can see also see the plugin in action at Talk Islam, under the sidebar section titled “Recent Journals”.
screenshot of AHP Recent Posts plugin for WPMU