Mark Szymanski, back for another WP Minute. Matt Medeiros,
it's always a
pleasure,
buddy.
I've been calling you my co host as I go about different podcasts and stuff like that. I hope you don't mind.
I'm fine with it. I'm excited to be here.
I'm not paying you. I'm just calling you.
Yeah. We're working on that in the back end. We're working
on that
in the back
end. Uh, we, we already recorded this similar topic, and as I tell you often, we're skating to where the puck is headed, and the fine folks at WP Product Talk actually really took it a step further, this subject of, uh, is WordPress on the decline, looking at stats.
Uh, this is stuff that Noel talked and, and, uh, Yoast have been, um, presenting and talking about for, for many years, of course, but of course, over the last year, uh, Noel's talk at WordCamp EU, I believe it was, um, or over this past year, not last year, but this past year, when he did that presentation in Europe, that, you know, really, uh, caused some ripples across the WordPress lake. Uh, they did a great job. I'll link that up in the show notes.
I already did a blog post recapping that, that episode on the WP minute. Thanks But Mark and I largely talk about the same thing, looking at Google trends and, and, and asking ourselves, is WordPress on the decline? We're going to talk about it again for a little bit, but I also want to talk about two other things.
One, I'm going to play this clip from Josepha from WordCamp US 2023, which is almost a year Or probably today, like a year old, um, from when they, they did, uh, State of the Word last year, or the State of the Word update, or whatever the heck they call it, at the end of WordCamps. And, um, we'll play that clip because I think it's important to understand all of this stuff.
Um, we are always operating in sort of a lag state where Josefa and Matt and maybe other folks in the leadership council And, Are talking about things and making decisions that are impacting us throughout the rest of the year. Let me, let me just play this clip. It'll start to make more sense. I'm picking up, um, deep into her talk at the future of WordPress, but here we go.
You're trying to figure out how to get involved with WordPress. I've got a simple first thing. One, use the software. So you're already doing it probably, right? That's the easiest way of joining into the WordPress project to make sure that we continue to thrive into the future because we exist for as long as people want to use our software.
That little moment right there that we exist for as long as people want to use our software and the rest of this talk, at least in my opinion, and I also wrote a summary about this, this presentation. is Josefa was really hitting on the fact that WordPress needs humans now. Like I took that when I listened to that entire talk, and I know this was just a little blip in that radar talk. So if you've never heard it before, listen to the whole thing.
But what she's encouraging for WordPress to thrive is for more people to, you know, to be excited about it, to educate, to promote it and to market it. Again, it's a call back to what this, today's episode is about. In that moment, one year ago, which was probably realized a year before that talk was created, WordPress is going to, we're in that plateau right now. Like, let's all just come to reality.
Some people are alarmists and saying it's, it's gonna, you know, it's the bottom is going to fall out that we're looking at numbers and it is going down, but it's not really going down that much. I think everyone realized that, yeah, we're going to hit a plateau. We're 20 years in. Yeah, we haven't innovated as fast as we wanted to. Um, it's not as sexy as the next competitor. It is kind of old and lethargic.
But, in order to keep going, we know we're not going to get those features in fast enough to, all of a sudden, this thing's going to start going up and to the right again. So, oh, by the way, we need people now. Like, WordPress needs people. And that was a little, you know, reflection, in my opinion, of leadership saying, we need to start working with our community a little bit better.
So as much as we, uh, criticize them about maybe the lack of communication and the lack of working with the community, in my opinion, that talk is what we're seeing now, or help bring us to where we are now with Anne McCarthy, Rich Tabor, even Jamie Marsland joining head of WordPress YouTube. We're starting to see those dominoes fall from that talk. In my opinion. Leadership has said, we need the humans again. Right? You're feeling a little bit appreciated.
You're feeling a lot more appreciated these days as a content creator. You know, a decade after I've been in this game, where I felt so underappreciated it wasn't even funny. Um, so I've, I think what we're starting to see are those, those cards play out. Josefa and team realizing a year ago and probably many months or a year before that going, Oh God, we got to make a plan. to reconnect with this community because that's how WordPress is going to grow over the next couple of years.
It's not going to be a Gutenberg block or a feature that we throw in. We gotta get people on board with the messaging. You could argue like I do, 10 years too late, or right on time. I don't know, depends on what, uh, how optimistic you are. But that was my opinion. I wanted to play that from Josepha because I look to those talks from Josepha and Matt Mullenweg's State of the Words as the milestones to the year ahead. So when you start pounding on the table, why this, why that? Why not them?
Why not us? I like to go back a year ago and say, look at these milestone presentations from leadership and what can you reverse engineer from that in your moment of time? That's, that's how I look at this stuff. Your thoughts, meaty subject, but do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, you made a couple points there. Uh, yeah, there was a lot there. Um, I mean, with that, with that little blurb specifically, I would be really interested to see if that's actually what was meant by that, if there was anything kind of behind that, or if it's just kind of like, again, kind of connecting dots that may or may not be there. Um, but again, I mean, you know, reality and what's going on, again, I gotta tip my hat all the time to Anne McCarthy.
Rich Tabor, all the people that are doing interviews, even Matt Mullenweg, obviously, doing interviews, like, Again, I always say this, but, like, I'm newer here, right, and I would say the one really cool thing about this whole space of WordPress is just how seemingly, not all, I wouldn't say, like, extremely easily, but how seemingly accessible everyone is. Even like, you know, somebody like Matt Mullen, right?
Like, I mean, we could, I know you've interviewed him, the Product Talk interviewed, Product Talk interviewed him recently. I'm sure if I reached out to him, he would at least consider it. You know what I mean? Like, you know, it's just, it's really cool cause you can't do that elsewhere. I don't think that you, it's as easy in other places, so.
Can't call up Tim Apple and be like, Hey man, Tim, get on the phone.
Yeah, seriously. And um, so I think that that's really cool. Really, really awesome.
At the same time, like, The question that I would have to you, trying to put the puzzle pieces together in my head, would be, we're talking, if you, if you used this last year as like, maybe a signal that we're trying to get back into like, the community and like, at least leverage more of the great minds in the community and like, the input, the opinions and all that sort of stuff, which, that's a deeper conversation, but assuming that is partially the case, right?
Partially, the, the, the methodology. What do you, what happened when I wasn't here, so to speak, and when other people weren't here, like, beforehand? Like, was it really community centric, and then it fell off because it got really big really fast, and then it kind of is coming back now because we realized we need that? You mentioned it in kind of like the opening monologue, so to speak, there, like, what, what, what was the, the condensed version of all that?
Did we, Did that kind of get lost at some point and I want to caveat real quick though because this whole sense of community There is absolutely a WordPress community but as you've literally said before it doesn't actually mean anything in in one aspect of You it's open source software like I told like when we first started having these conversation I was like, why don't they just do this this and this or why don't they listen to us?
And they're like it that's not how it works So the sense of, I feel like there's a lot of language thing. I was talking about this on my live stream yesterday. The language in this space though, is extremely confusing. So that's just, that's kind of where I'm at. I know I threw a lot back at you there, but yeah.
Um, Yeah, so for sure, this is just a little blip on the radar. That little snippet, the way that I digested her presentation was they need people for WordPress to thrive. Like everyone needs to get on board in some form or fashion. And if you continue that clip from where I left it off, she starts talking about like learning WordPress.
And, and, uh, and earlier in the presentation, Also talking about how WordPress can literally change lives and, and I also agree with that because it changed my life and it changed so many other lives that I know from either people starting services, business, product, business, et cetera. We're all able to thrive personally when WordPress is doing well and I think that was, that was her sort of message to everyone. What was the community like before this?
Um, I think we're, we're in that unique, interesting time where there was never. This, this feeling that we have in WordPress, while some of the arguments are the same, um, we, we might be at a different sort of, uh, velocity, or our footprint is a lot bigger. So, for example, uh, you know, when, when folks like KG and, and all these other folks, uh, are, you know, railing against, You know, why leadership doesn't pay attention to the website builders that are out there.
Why aren't they listening to us? We're the ones making a hundred sites, a thousand sites for clients. Like, we're in the weeds building this thing. Make this software better for us. This was the same argument that I had ten years ago with Mullenweg when Mullenweg was shipping Jetpack as the way that WordPress is going to grow. Right?
And I was like, wait a minute, how is, how, how are you saying Jetpack has grown or how, how are you tying together WordPress's growth because of Jetpack, which it was something that he said at, uh, at a Pressnomics, which is what led me to my first interview, uh, with him talking about that. I didn't pull any clips from that episode, but I will in the future. And there's, there's the same kind of, uh, strife. It's just in, in the It's different sizes now.
Then it was just Jetpack and now it's like you're looking at all of WordPress going, why haven't you made, you know, WordPress better for us, uh, instead of this little, you know, plugin. We've all had, we've had these, these struggles for a while. I think what's interesting now is that because the software has gotten better over the last, let's call it 10 years. 10 years and the, uh, introduction of other page building tools. name all of them. All of them are responsible.
You know, Beaver Builder, Divi, Elementor, Bricks, every page builder, um, Visual Composer, has brought in a whole new breed of, of customers and users into, or users into WordPress. Over the last, let's say, five to ten years, and now that customer, or I keep saying customer, but now that user is going, Hey, when is this thing getting better? You know, I got into this game five, eight, 10 years ago.
And, um, you know, I was able to use these plugins, but now I really don't see anything changing too dramatically over this, over the course of this five to eight to 10 years. Like, why isn't it getting better? And we have now a much more, um, we have more of those folks than the previous 10 years.
Which were just hardcore geeks and developers who were touching WordPress and just having those conversations off to the side, either literally building WordPress or didn't give a shit about, you know, workflows and easy to use software because they were like, man, I'm cracking open my code editor and I'm building these themes and plugins. That's what I do. I don't care about page builders. I mean, I've said this to you before on the show before back then.
If you use a page builder, you are getting that same sort of like animosity that maybe Bricks users give to Elementor people today. Right? Like when a Bricks user goes, Oh my God, you're using Elementor. Foolish. Right? Like, I can't believe you still use that. I'm on this Bricks thing, which is way better. Back then, If, The biggest crowd, the biggest audience here were developers, still are largely, but back then it was just pure developers.
And if you brought a page builder into the game, you're just, they were looking at you going, get out of here with that thing. Now, again, a decade later, people are like, okay, I guess these things are here to stay. I mean, we have Gutenberg and now we have Elementor as a massive company in the WordPress space. People are like, okay, I guess, yeah, I guess these things are staying. So now there's a group of people, a lot larger and a lot more vocal.
You know, than the geeky developer who just, I don't care about anything else, I'm just gonna write this code and optimize it myself. And we have, we're in this, hitting this crossroads now, um, that WordPress has never seen. The power user who knows how to use this stuff and knows how to sell it is like, give me better, give me faster, and give it to me now because we're dying out here compared to the competitors, Webflow, Wix, whatever. Um Which I don't fully buy, but that's the sentiment.
Um, and I don't think WordPress has ever seen this before. And that's why it's very important, I think, for WordPress. And this is why you see a concerted effort from Automatic, whether you agree with it or not, um, to really, you know, dig their heels into, into the community. Again, you could say, ten years too late. Um, but also, they gotta do it. And I'm glad that they're doing it.
So, we just sort of, I just sort of keep them at a, at an arm's length is kind of a harsh statement, but I just, okay, let's, what do you want? How do you want to do this thing? I've been saying it for years, you know, KG's been saying it for a couple years, and it's like, give it to us, and let's, let's, let's work through this and see if we can get there.
So are you saying that, They've never really tried to do it like this then to your, Oh God, no,
this is no, like if you were to look at, I mean, look at, so we're going to talk about the marketing stuff and again, I'll implore people to go and watch the WP product talk, um, presentation because marketing came up a lot. Like how are we going to make WordPress better? Uh, we need, you know, better marketing. And does that marketing come from, from automatic or does it come from a consortium of, of brands, you know, in the space?
I have a real life story about, you know, ad consortiums and brand consortiums that are, that is not too good. Um, I'll save it for the end here, but, um, certainly WordPress, or, you have to be careful, certainly Automatic has not reached out to work with content creators like this before, right? Even though I feel like Anne's just on her own side quest and it's not an official thing, um, it's as official as it gets, and that's good.
We saw the failures of the official WordPress make marketing team, right? Couldn't do anything. Um, in Ray's post today on the tavern, excuse me on the repository. Uh, she said she, you know, she quoted some of Yost's pain points from when he was the marketing lead for like nine months or 11 months, whatever it was three months. I don't know what it was, but he was like, I can't do anything.
Like here's, here's a guy who not only runs the most popular at the time, the most popular SEO plugin ever. Knows SEO and marketing like the back of his hand is a prominent figurehead in the WordPress community. He stepped in and he was like, Nope, can't do it. Right? Because he looked at it and goes, any marketing person who, who knows marketing and needs, access to resources cannot do this job in a volunteer environment.
So the marketing team has failed and frozen, not from the end users, not from their perspectives, but just from the fact that they don't have the access, the data or the, um, the, the power to really shape a marketing message for open source WordPress, right? My biggest arguments against the Jamie Marsland, um, gig that happened. So very difficult. You have media core. Um, also head of, headed by an automatic lead.
I think Reyes is doing a phenomenal job, uh, but it's still an automatic lead doing a media core, trying to build out a media core experiment. I think it's going fairly good in the, in the first couple of months. It is exactly what I had expected it to be a more professional, organized way to say, here's the things coming out of WordPress. Do you all want to cover this content? Cool. Thumbs up.
I think it's good, but we all have to remember this is an automatic is the one leading the charge of, of what's happening out of that group. And us as media guys and gals choose to cover it or not, right? It's up to us. And then you have the tavern, which is owned by Audrey Capital, uh, Matt's company. So you have a lot of these places that are going to help market and push WordPress. Yes, but also, Controlled by automatic at the same time.
And you take that with your grain of salt, however, however big that is. But that's a long way of getting to no automatic has never really pushed into the creator space for messaging like this always have supported community, but more so on like the, Hey, help us build WordPress thing, not the help us get this message out about WordPress.
Do you think there's a reason for that? Do you think like they were just. for lack of a better way to explain it, just like busy before and just didn't think that it was necessary. And now they see, now they see all the, like the, you know, the sharks in the water, so to speak again, it's a little bit hyperbolic, but like they see like other, they see like how big of a deal influencer marketing, so to speak, is in creator based marketing.
And now we're like, Hmm, you know, we should probably consider you actually, do you think that that's, The problem that I have with these conversations is they're all, they're all really good. But like we talked about off camera, like you don't want to create like just an echo chamber of just like random speculation and random ideas. So like, I just feel like I need to do a better job of this, but like, I feel like there's, we have the access to the people that I assume are taking action.
Like, you know, there's definitely rooms that people are making decisions in. And like those ideas are, you know, potentially flowing down, but obviously we have, we have the other situations like we, like we talked to Ann and that's fantastic. The, uh, YouTuber program is fantastic. Apparently that's not like a top down thing. That's more of just like, again, like you said, kind of a side quest and cool.
That's awesome that that freedom exists, but I feel like in some of the bigger things, the bigger messaging pieces, the bigger, the bigger plays. Automatic is a, is a for profit corporation, right? And they, and WordPress is a big part of what they do. com and all that. So like, I feel like these things that we're talking about, they have answers. So like somebody, somebody has answers to this, you know what I mean?
So I feel like that's, that's part of the thing that, um, you know, when I ask these types of questions, it's like, how did these things come to be? And we're just kind of like putting the, you know, trying to put the dots, you know, connect the dots sometimes. Yeah. It's a little, it's a little tough. Um, I don't know. I don't exactly know where I was going with that. Yeah, no, I
get what you're saying. Like, why do you think this is happening? Well, again, I'll just go back to what I said. I think it's because they've realized that There is a, we are hitting a plateau. So again, if you, the WP product talk presentation, old talk and, and Yost, um, talk about their numbers and on either the, the slight decline, um, in installs, the numbers can be measured in different ways.
So obviously check out that episode if you want to see how it, how it all came, you know, it came together. There's nothing that is, we're not watching WordPress crashing, right? So there's that. So let's, let's hold on a second. We're not, we're not crashing here. But I think they've realized that, yeah, we're gonna hit a plateau. I mean, how, at some point, like, you're not gonna keep having that velocity of growth, right?
Because, um, you know, technology's gonna get better faster and competitors are gonna come into the market like they have and it's gonna just slow down the way that WordPress, um, uh, um, continues to grab that market share. So I think that the reason is, is yeah, they've identified that we're going to be hitting a plateau season. For whatever, however long that is, a couple of years.
Um, and now it's time to look outward from just like the, the folks who build and write lines of code for WordPress, to the folks who are marketing and, and possibly implementing, um, you know, WordPress for, for their clients. And I totally agree with you, um, You know, it would be great to get people with direct answers on the line and, and ask them. I do think, uh, that 90 percent of this, all roads lead back to Matt. And, um, to have Matt on every call would be near impossible.
Um, so I can only operate off of these, like, key presentations. Especially from Josepha, right? Executive Director of WordPress. So I, I have to look at. These presentations as this is what you're telling us, right? This is your update. Um, One of the benefits to the media core is that Josefa will be in the media, the next media core meeting for us media folks. Um, which is fantastic because now this could help bridge that gap of, look, we need to talk to people, we need to ask these questions.
Um, so, um, done in a professional manner. You know, with that caveat. Because a lot of people in, you know, especially in the Twitter sphere is just like, well, ask them why we don't have this block. You know, or why can't I drag this over there and import that? It's like, well, that's not, this is not for that. This is for the, you know, the health of overall WordPress and where this whole thing is going. You know, you can take your feature concerns at another time.
So yeah, maybe these efforts will help us get there. I wanted to, to play this clip before we started talking about the marketing side of it. Um, because I think it sets the tone of, of what we're all feeling right now. That's the way that I perceive this, this talk. I've watched it a couple of times. Um, yeah, August 31st, 2023. So literally one year old tomorrow is when she gave this presentation. So I think we're right on track.
And if you continue listening to this, To this, she starts talking about the, like, the learn efforts. And we just saw, what, a couple weeks ago, the, the redesign of, of the learn site and the efforts that they're putting into the learn site.
So, this is exactly the proof in, in my pudding is to hear her talk about this stuff and literally see it, you know, six months, or actually eight months in the future, finally coming, what am I saying, eight months, a year, a year into the future, finally the, the learn site. has improved, which is one of the things that she talked about. Like we have to get learning better and easier and more accessible.
So I look to these moments, the Matt Mullenweg state of the words, and whenever she does her, um, I don't know what they're called, but her capstone events at WordCamp US. Um, I look at those as, you know, that's, that's the signal. That's the direction. Um, I'd love to have them on every call, but I, I just have to use what I have in front of me.
Certainly. Um, what is, so to kind of. Summarize this, obviously, from your perspective. And I know, I'm sure we've talked about this, but I don't know if it's been, I've been, I've directly asked it like this. What is your, in August, late August of 2024, based on everything that, you know, we've seen here, what is your current perspective on, like, the, I don't wanna, there's probably multiple ways to say it, but like, the health of WordPress, the, uh, Wordpress.
org, like the open source software, the health of it, the current position of it, and more so than the current position, like, where do you see it, where do you see it, like, in the past three years versus the next three years, or something like that, you know what I mean? Like, what's your, what's your gauge on this now? Because I feel like even since we've started talking, it's, it's possibly changed slightly. Not heavily, but I feel like more, more conversations have been had.
More, more things have been said. Yeah, yeah. So, where are you at right now?
I'm much more optimistic on the software side of things. And I guess, and the community side of things. Not, yeah, not I guess. It is. I'm much more, I'm much more optimistic on both the software and the community than I was three years ago. Yeah. Three years ago, I was like, Oh boy, like there was, you know, but, but also like the economics, uh, the economy, sorry, was also. Weird for agencies like a lot of agencies three years ago. We're like, what are we like? What's happening?
We really got to tighten this belt now during kovat. Everybody was like I'm printing money. Yeah, and this is amazing
example Yeah, right,
you know But coming out of that people like where the hell did that all go and and no I think it was no that brought this up in the In the presentation, but you know, when you look at the swings in the economy, a lot of people, this is why I always say, like, this is why WordPress is strongest advantage.
I know it's easy to throw out that strong advantage of, oh, it's just open source, but in a top down approach, there are massive organizations that, uh, Go, uh, yeah, we're done paying Adobe for their CMS 10 million a year in licensing, and we're going to shift over to an open source model. And that's, that's an investment for a long term.
So when you can, when that glacier moves over of some massive organization that says, okay, now we're gonna, we're gonna skip this Microsoft SharePoint or Adobe CMS, I forget what theirs is called, um, and, and, and, and, and, um, Oracles stuff, like whatever big corporate entity that they're paying millions and millions of dollars for, never mind the salaries and support licenses that they have to pay for. And they invest in a WordPress, or any open source, but they invest in a WordPress.
That's not just, they're not going to change out of that decision a year from now. They go, okay, well WordPress didn't work. No, no, like those organizations don't move that way. So if you can get somebody in like that. That, that's an investment in, in WordPress open source, open source WordPress for five to ten years because that's just how those corporations move and they're investing so much time and money into these things. So economies, the economy can play a big role in adoption.
Um, it's easy to say WordPress is free, um, and while it's not free at that scale, it is magnitudes less expensive than a Microsoft SharePoint and an Adobe. So. All of that is to say is, I think we're in a better place. Uh, three years, I feel it. Um, with all the noise that I hear, I don't see anyone actually leaving. When Gutenberg launched, I saw people leaving. Right? Like a year into it, people are like, I'm out.
Like, that's when I saw other people looking at other no code solutions, Statimic, people, you know, developers that were building plugins for WordPress, going, you know what? I don't even want to sell plugins anymore for this space. I want to go just go after this other stuff. And I saw people leaving. I don't see people leaving here.
So, yes. I, I agree. I don't see too many people leaving either. I mean, I'm not, I don't have my finger on the pulse of the data, which as a side note, it would be amazing if we get even better data. I know wordpress. org or automatic or somebody has like decent data. We've, we've potentially looked at before. I've seen it on other stuff and things like that.
Maybe it was the YouTuber call or whatever, but, um, That would be amazing if we could like do more surveys or something to get like a broader mass. I know we're just dealing with a ton of, uh, information though. So that's tough, but, um, What was I going to say? The thing that you're saying, though, is I know we're not pulling up the charts like we did in our I'm building
one right now so we can pull it up because
I
knew you were going to go there.
But like, that's what I'm, what I'm kind of thinking is, you know, if you look at the last three years, the next three years, obviously you can't predict the future, but like, even the trends over the last, if you extrapolate back like five or ten years, if you go back, those There's charts we looked at, like comparatively, just like Google Trends to the other platforms. It makes sense that WordPress is kind of plateauing because there's more options now and things like that.
But to, to, there's a, I feel like there's a subtle conversation nuance to be had where, yeah, I don't see a lot of people leaving WordPress, but I don't actually even hear that argument that much. I hear people not coming to WordPress. Because the other stuff's either easier, easier to get into, or is just like marketed better. Like, I feel like, I don't, I personally, from what I've seen, I don't think there's a exodus problem.
I think there's a, what's the word, um, awareness or, there's a better word for it, um, escaping me right now. But like a, not even a searchability, just like a, you know, um, I don't know, it'll come to me, but like finding it, like almost finding WordPress and realizing that it is ultimately one of the best solutions. Um, you know, I did like though, I'll say this and I'll let you go over the chart.
Um, Mark's live stream, I don't know when this is going out, but like, um, pronounce his last name for me that you just did.
Oh, Benzikin.
Yeah. Mark Benzikin's, uh, presentation, there was a specific line and the whole thing was great, but the specific line in there where it was like, Don't like like realize that there are competitors and they might be better for certain things like I do actually like that approach I mean, I personally probably would use WordPress for 99 percent of the things but if something comes out that WordPress isn't Specific for or like you really need like an easy super duper easy like e commerce thing for
certainly there's WooCommerce There's SureCart, but like in some cases maybe Shopify is the thing we got to be honest with ourselves as far as like Actual requirements because every project is different. So my point though in saying, but I think a lot of times WordPress could be the answer. And I think a lot of times people aren't getting to that step. So I think that's really where potentially hopefully automatic is understanding that piece because I don't, I don't see an exodus problem.
I see like a, you know, an entrance problem, you know, like getting into it.
Yeah. Yeah. And hold that thought for the, for like the marketing stuff, but when we, we look at the, so for those watching, we have the Google trends and, and I think Noel brought this up too, that I think his data or at least one of those slides was based off of this and it's just the keyword of WordPress, which, I mean, it's telling, but it's not like that means that WordPress is interesting, uh, or, or that somebody was actually searching for, give me a WordPress website. Right.
Um, and same goes for all this other stuff, like WordPress, Webflow, Wix, we're just, this is just a search term trend. Um, you know, from a, from a 50, 000 foot view, you could say that it's, it's popularity, but it doesn't necessarily mean that this leads to a WordPress install, a Webflow install, a Wix install.
The problem real quick the problem with this this experiment that you know I ran the other day I told you about and then we did think and we're doing here The problem is that when you think of a web flow website? There is I'm gonna say there's basically nothing else that you're gonna search in order to find web flow or Wix with WordPress It may be interesting to add like an element or Or like a Divi to the comparison.
And then you'd have to somehow do like a complicated math equation to try to figure out like, Oh, we got to take like at least a percentage of this into account. So I'm not saying again, like this isn't like fully telling either, but it would be interesting to just see, like, to kind of start some of that data. And again, Elementor is pretty low, but it's, it's incredible that Elementor alone, right, is the same as Webflow. Yeah. According to these.
Yeah.
So,
uh, and Wix just destroys it. Right. So if you go, then if you go square space. Well, actually, you know what you can do? You can do visual composer.
That's a big one.
Yeah, but it's not even on there. I think the problem with visual composer is it's just in a theme and most people don't even know. Uh, let's go square space.
Like, I'd be interested in like Divi and Beaver Builder, but I still think Elementor is probably going to be the biggest. Yeah. In this, this, uh, Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. And if we take,
if we take these out, so if you're just, if you're just listening, you're not seeing us, uh, modify these charts. Uh, let me just remove Wix and Squarespace so we can just see this battle.
Wow. So this is, this right here is a really interesting chart actually, because this, you know, we're seeing here on the screen for you listeners, if we're just podcasting here is Webflow Search term comparisons in Google, Google trending and pretty much all similar, especially more recently. But that's like, those are two WordPress page voters versus like a whole platform and Webflow. So again, I said this the other day I was live streaming.
I was like Webflow is like the second thing out of WordPress people's mouth, which is fine. Like that's whatever. But I just find it so interesting cause like it's the, it's the smallest one. Like they must just be hammering. along the lines of the same people that would like be like WordPress tinkerers and like kind of agency type owners. I guess, I guess like Webflow is just not really for DIY or at all. Like they probably haven't like gone that route too much.
Yeah, definitely not. Definitely not. Um, Yeah. So, I mean, I, I think, You know, when you look at, uh, so this is just a five year chart, right? When, I think when we had pre recorded this and, uh, or previously recorded this, we were looking at like a ten year chart or something like that, and WordPress was just massive, right? And dominant.
And it was literally following, You know, my argument to the first 10 years of WordPress was, man, it was the only thing that was out there that people were able to build websites with. Uh, you know, of course, launched blogs, which were very popular back then. It was the social media before social media. And people were just like, yeah, give me this thing. I need it. This is technology. This is the internet. I'm connecting with people. Give it to me.
And then when you cross that 10 year path, where you started to see the rise of Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, all these other things, Shopify more so than Webflow, of course. That was an indication of, yeah, 10 years in consumer internet has matured and a lot more competition prices went down for technology, servers, storage, bandwidth, you know, back then everything else was way more expensive to operate.
And then just an increase in competition and softwares that came out, um, and WordPress had to battle that none of these other, like all these other platforms Had the luxury of like, looking at, um, you know, the, the past decade of WordPress and, and building on it. I make this case all the time.
It's like, you know, if you're a new form builder, I work for gravity forms, and you're a new form builder, you come into the space and you get to build your form, build, build a, build a plugin based off of like, The last 14 years at Gravity Forms has been in business, right? And you don't have to, you don't have to worry about all of the backwards compatibility and all this stuff. WordPress, same thing.
These platforms come out, they can look at WordPress and be like, Well, we ain't doing that. And be a hosted solution because we're not giving it to every individual to download and do whatever they want with. Which is something that I think is, you know, vastly overlooked in this, this, this desire for WordPress to be better.
Is that you can still take this thing off the shelf, put it onto your computer, and break it apart, and look at it, and do things, and it doesn't even have to be, um, you know, a, a, a, building a website, you could just take it apart, and learn and understand code from it, and move on with your life, like these are things that, you know, You know, you see people speed running video games with like, uh, you know, an old like Atari stick and you're like, wait, that's not even supposed to be using
that. Well, guess what? I'm a human. I can do these crazy, wild things to prove, you know, to prove my point. Um, WordPress has this flexibility and this opportunity that are unmatched across the board, you know, in my opinion.
Well, I don't know if anybody in, uh, I don't know if anybody that actually knows anything about WordPress would argue with that,
that
last point there. I mean, obviously it has an incredible flexibility, robustness, versatility, whatever you want to call it, because that's why we're here. I think a lot, I think the vast majority of people, that's why they're here, right?
They're either, if you look at the, the big avatars, they're either like, you know, a large enterprise, which I don't have direct experience with, but I've learned from guys like you, Brian Cords and stuff, like, The large enterprise people that need like an open source solution, highly customized, highly curated, makes perfect sense there.
They're either DIY wires that literally just heard that potentially older DIY wires to seemingly got, I got to put that asterisk in there because it was probably something that they found probably, you know, in that first 10 year mark, potentially they heard about it, they've always tinkered with it. It's very interesting. Uh, it's a little bit of a generalization there, but. But, but they've also found that it was, it was free open source.
I don't know how they necessarily got sold on that, but again, it's probably like a very cheap option too. Um, and it's versatile, which is incredible. Or you have the people that have kind of outgrown maybe other tools, you know, maybe they went to Webflow or they went to Wix or Squarespace and they're like, okay, well now what I can't do X, Y, and Z. How do I get, how do I, How do I add a store? How do I do this or whatever?
And then, then maybe they find a YouTube video or something and it's like, okay, WordPress, but I mean, I don't know how deeply you want to go into this, but like, I really just think the question becomes like, there's a couple of questions that just pop up from what you're saying there though, is the first one is that obviously WordPress was first there and they had 10 golden years of being the only. So, you know, roughly 10 golden years being the only one there, which is awesome.
Well, it's very, it's like, this is extremely natural. I'm not a huge history buff. I'm sure we could find examples of times where like somebody innovates and they're there for a period of time. And then six other people come in, they learn from all the mistakes, they build a better product in a fraction of the time.
better, you know, subjectively in a fraction of the time, then ultimately where that ends up going, and I'm not saying this is WordPress, I'm just saying this is a, this is a historic, this is has to be a historical trend where like over the next 10 years, 15, 20 years, the first one can't dig itself out from, from under that hole. And then it ends up going either by the wayside or just like way more of a plateau or way less of a, of a, of a, uh, Of a player in the space.
I guarantee we can see that somewhere. Industry. Somebody, oh God. Yeah, I mean,
Apple and Microsoft. Perfect examples. You know,
yeah, I mean, New England
Patriots.
This guy, it's big Tom Brady guy, um, you can
only win for so long, man. And then like people age out of success and that's, you know, exactly.
So I mean, the thing, the thought would be, what do you do there? I mean, cause again, I feel like this is kind of like in that spot. So it's like. Are you going to, you know, there's a phrase like adapt or die. I don't know if that perfectly applies here, but that's like one thing that kind of comes to mind. There's another thing where it's just like, maybe now the second half of WordPress potentially or whatever is more of just like a more mature phase where it's like, Hey, you know what?
Our original goal was just to be like a publishing platform. We still have that in our philosophy 20 years later, although over that time, the philosophy by the community and the third party ecosystem has been extended incredibly. And we don't really align exactly with that, but we're not going to like say, no, you can't do that. So now, it's like, we're just going to go back to our roots. I'm saying this possible option.
Like, we're just going to go back to our roots because we're, we're not like directly, we are kind of competing with people, but we're not kind of competing with these other ones and like, we want more people on the platform, but we're also like, not exactly, we're not exactly offering the same thing as like a Squarespace and a Wix. So we're just going to stick to what we know and what we pioneered as like the publishing piece. And we're going to do that.
And we're going to let the third party people just take care of whatever they want. And if you need something other than blog and publishing features, you can Ask someone else. That is kind of the vibe that I'm hearing and I'm trying to piece all this together.
And, uh, it's actually not a terrible plan, assuming everyone still cares enough and assuming the world doesn't continue to spiral into this like complete Lack of, you know, data protection, open source, like, like I genuinely believe that like as a younger person, like I genuinely believe with way less people care about open source. I do, but I'm saying like, you have all these, you know, young whippersnappers, right?
That are just out here on their phones, like in their data stolen all the time or whatever, you know, wherever. And then they have all this other concern. And like, if you asked a kid right now, how did they set up a website? I think honestly, they'd probably be like more like, Oh, just go follow my Instagram rather than like follow my blog and stuff. And I mean, this might be cyclical, this might come back, you know, kind of the other way. I hope it does.
I'm trying to kind of do that with some of the stuff I do, and I know you are. But I know there's a lot there, but that's kind of, that's kind of my new understanding of what we got going on here, to an extent. I don't know if any of that resonates.
I think what good leaders will recognize is how to deal with either failure or downturn. Or you're just not the number one pick. And everyone should be comfortable with losing. Um, I am very comfortable with losing. In fact, I feel like I'm losing every single day and it's what keeps me coming back. Um, when you're at the top and, and like that first 10 year ride of, of WordPress, it's phenomenal. Like you can't even imagine.
How, what that's like, but we've, you know, when you say like it has this ever happened in history before you look at any successful tech company that just like, wow, I can't believe how fast they're rising. Look at this is amazing. And then they crash and burn because there's this artificialness to it. Um, and in this is a rough statement, but it's like in, in the, the real leaders are made in the wartime. Right?
The real downturn stuff on how you are going to, you know, keep the mission going, keep people, uh, you know, backing the cause, and generally, like, continue to build your thing to keep it going. Um, we're in that time. Largely with, with WordPress and automatic. This is why I feel like we're going to have like a real automatic reckoning pretty soon. Where, where something has to, like the band aid is going to get ripped off. And it's going to be like, we're automatic.
We're here to make money with WordPress, WordPress. The best place to get it is wordpress. com and or jetpack. And then by the way, we have this open source thing. It's not said like that today. Today. It's just like Matt community automatic. Like we're all in the same room together. I think it's going to be much more of like. 60 percent of WordPress is automatic. 40 percent is the community in terms of the package and the presentation when it comes from wordpress.
com and automatic, um, because they need to get serious in survival again, just my opinion, but I don't think people should just get comfortable with winning all the time. Do you have to win all the time? Do you have to have the commanding lead of all content management systems? Um, my opinion is, is no. And when you're. When you're not finding that success is when you're learning those lessons and you constantly shift.
When I started the WP Minute, everybody was joining the membership, I was like, boom. I solved WordPress news, community journalism, I got it. People were, you know, sending me clips, they were writing, you know, blog posts for me, and it died out. And I am constantly re evolving, um, re evolving, re evaluating, and, uh, evolving the, the packaging in the presentation of the WP Minute. Uh, a standout, um, WordPress product that is doing just that is Beaver Builder, right?
Beaver Builder, still a successful company, still going strong, still profitable by all means. Accounts like, I, you know, I don't see any, I don't see any downturn, everyone, their prices are going up, so they, they're, they're understanding that they have to stay sustainable, and they're, and they're not, um, chasing the Elementor and the Divis and the Bricks, they, they have a strong user base, how?
Well, they got there early, number one, but they put out a great product and they listened to their customers. What the hell is wrong with that? You know, at one time I jumped into the cesspool of Facebook groups, which is the worst thing for, for me to do. And somebody was like, what's up with Beaver Builder? They haven't done anything and yada, yada, yada.
And I was like, Oh, suddenly a business that's been in years, been in business for over a decade, serving their customers happy, healthily and without chasing the buzzwords is a bad thing. And people just like laugh emojis on it. It's just like, why do I even show up here? Because this crowd just wants free fast and 29 lifetime plans, right? There's nothing wrong with building a sustainable, profitable company that isn't super sexy and isn't just dominant.
Um, in my opinion, both from like a product perspective and from, you know, a personal perspective, like I freaking like, I love to lose because I learned that lesson. I love to win, of course, but I also, I don't mind living in that moment. And when I'm winning, I already know. There's going to be a downturn.
Now, this is all obviously because I grew up a lot in sales and, uh, you know, the deal's never done until the client signs and everyone says yes until, you know, the terms come, uh, in front of them. But, um, yeah, so it's like, I don't think we always have to win. And I, you know, Matt said something too. And, and I think you just reiterated it. Like, what, what would it look like if we just spent a year frozen fixing stuff?
You're going to have the people who are like, Oh, you're going to lose ground to all these other people. Yeah, well. Sometimes you need to stop and do a spring cleaning.
I don't know how many people would actually say that. I, I think a lot of
people would freak out about like no features for a year. Look how, look how they freak out about no features now. What
are the features? I don't think, I, I, maybe we're, maybe we're, I know we're very connected but I think we're talking to slightly different crowds because I, I get way less. I know a lot of
people in the community. I know the most amount of people in the community.
Yes you do. Uh, I, I, I, Uh, what I hear more of is, is more of the fixing side. Like there's, they've created problems. Obviously, and again, We're, we're leaving out a large portion of this that goes kind of without said of like the amount of technical debt that you rack up when you do all this type of thing, so. We talked about that kind of before, but that I hear more from that angle rather than like, Oh, why don't they have this, this, and this? Like, yeah, for sure.
Like, you know, mobile responsiveness or whatever. Like, but I feel like at least people I talked to, it's more of like, I don't like what has been done so far. So if we could fix that, I feel like they would be happy about that. Surely. Nope. Surely everybody wants everything to be perfect and done as fast as possible and new stuff. I get that. But that's not realistic. One other point I want to make is that you said.
First thing, are you saying that we're in the, the stage of WordPress where hard times create strong men? Yeah. Or are you saying that we haven't gotten there yet?
No, I think we're, I think we've been in it. I think we've loosely been in it. I don't think you're going to see, like, again, I don't think you'll ever see WordPress crash and burn. I think it, if, if, if there were ever like a five year downturn, it would be slow, it wouldn't be off a cliff.
Yeah, I don't, I don't see that as being possible either, and I'm not sure many people are actually saying that or suggesting that. I think it's more of just like, they see They see that the growth rate is not a growth rate really anymore. They just see that it's a plateau or they see that it's maybe a slight decline or like certain stats are indicating that again. Sure. We're not the only people talking about that.
And in five years you could have, the upturn could be 10x because all of these people who left WordPress to go to these other platforms are now, will come back to WordPress. Because here's the equation, in my opinion, and, you know, I'd love to hear from folks listening to this, Webflow, let's say Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, um, Shopify. What props this up? What, what props those product companies up? What holds them up? Customers, people giving them money, right? That is what keeps them going.
So there's always that. struggle of marketing dollars, product dollars, you know, taking from one platform and getting them on boarding. Then maybe they go one square space guy goes to Wix, goes to Shopify. The only thing that props those companies up is dollars and money and users and customers in the WordPress world. It's open source.
So WordPress is propped up just like Joseph has said in that clip is, By the people, we need people to be using it, and people to be interested in it, because if they're not, there's no WordPress. People keep WordPress propped up. Dollars keep Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and Webflow propped up. Because as soon as the dollars dry out, those companies will fall off a cliff. Dollars can dry out in WordPress. And you won't see an off the cliff.
You might see a gradual decline, but it won't be off the cliff. Those other will go out of business. There's no going out of business in open source WordPress.
I mean, I'm not going to act like I know exactly how everything works here, but like just trying to, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I definitely agree with the fact that like the other side is like dollars a hundred percent agree, but I think. Is the term reductive? Is it too reductive to say that WordPress is just people? Because if there was no money, there would also be no, no people like there would be like in, in current state of like the, how the world works.
Like this is a big conversation around the contributing thing for contributing thing for either if you're sponsored or if you're just doing free contribution or whatever, like, and we've had this conversation before, but it gets very nuanced there. I feel like, are you. Like what's, I think what I think you're saying is yes, at the core of it, if there's no people, because it's open source, there's no people, people are propping it up. I get that. But is that actually the full story?
Meaning like the contributors that are contributing, A lot of them are getting paid by either automatic or a GoDaddy or whatever. And if WordPress, again, we're playing hypotheticals here, but if WordPress went on a strict downturn and like it got actually bleak, it's nowhere near that, nor do I really think it's going to get there, but like if, but it's only not going to get there if we recognize that these things are possible, we can't like think anything is infallible.
That is, that is literally how you go extinct regardless of what you are. But if. If WordPress did look very bleak, don't you think like a go daddy, I'm making names up here, but like, don't you think like a go daddy or somebody would be like, eh, we're gonna, like they might reconsider because what they're doing is they are literally paying people to go work to some degree on it, or maybe they would pull back or something like that.
But yeah,
but that's, but, but what I'm saying is that's ultimately goes back to the money. It, it, it's people for sure, but it goes back to the money. Now you may have a situation where somebody is like, okay, well. I want to turn WordPress around. I'm just going to volunteer more or I'm going to, whatever. I'm like, you take the money out of it somehow. I just, I just don't know how that's like a,
I think it's the actual
reality.
The economics of a project being propped up by people versus money is the web flow. Like again, square space, any, any of these square space, Shopify, Shopify is a better example. Shopify, cause it's the most expensive. Although web flow is pretty up there for e commerce. Um, Or, no, Webflow is a good example because Webflow is probably the one that, Webflow is probably the one that you do have to worry the most about this. Because, long term. 100%, long term. Not right now.
Not right now, but long term. Um, Shopify will probably win because of all the investment money that it already has and the brand equity that it owns. Um, throughout people's, you know, Cognitive level of understanding like if I want e commerce, I'm generally looking at Shopify. Um, But Webflow would be one where suddenly just like we see with freaking Inflation and streaming services going up and you know YouTube premium was once 12 bucks and now it's 22 bucks or whatever That's not for us.
I'm just like how why I'm on the family
plan.
Yeah I'm just like I don't even understand how you're charging me more because the way I see it as a tech person Bandwidth costs are going down, but then people are saying well energy costs are going up So man, so there's like all of those things Economics impacted those companies where if bandwidth and storage and energy and, um, payroll and taxes and operating in different global in governments and environments and tax regulation, all that stuff.
is what impacts these companies like a web and investors, right? And investors like, give me a return on this investment, or we're not giving you more money for the runway you need to hire more people to do more marketing, to do more advertising. All of those economics are straightforward impacting, um, these companies, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify. And in the WordPress side, it's While, yes, you make the argument of like, don't a lot of people get paid?
Yes, but this is that tug of war of open source where WordPress is open source, so it's not like GoDaddy has to pay a WordPress license. As long as they're, they can, anyone can use it. They don't have to give back to WordPress if they don't want to. But, they choose to because they realize it makes all of WordPress better, which does improve their position. But they don't have to.
There's plenty of, Hosts out there that do nothing for WordPress and still sell air quotes WordPress hosting and and there's a massive You know lead flow for them is give me that WordPress site for five bucks a month and they happily say yes And they don't give back so Yeah, these other companies are Tied to that economic success for them. Whereas WordPress, you know, it's it's not like that
Uh,
yeah, I mean, I, I, I guess I get what you're saying. I'm just not fully, I guess I just don't fully, it hasn't fully clicked with me yet because I still feel like GoDaddy is a for profit corporation and pretty much everything that they do is, I would have to assume we're picking on GoDaddy, but it could be anybody. I'm assuming that a company of that size cares about money because they wouldn't be there if they didn't care about money.
So like, if you take that and then you say, okay, well, why are they working on WordPress? Well, it's because it makes the money. But if it stopped making them money, which you could, you could theory craft a world where that didn't happen, because that's effectively what we're doing, then they wouldn't probably be working on it. And they would go to stat statmatic or whatever, like something else. So like. In that world and in that chain of events, I just still feel like it comes back to money.
I understand the nuance of this situation. It's not the same, but in a world where you have to have money to eat and to survive, I don't know how it doesn't come back to the money. And I'm not saying I even like that. I'm just saying, like, I don't, I don't know
how. What would really be interesting is if, just as again, a theory crafting experiment, is if Wix said, Oh, we have a licensed version of Wix now. And any web host can install it. That would really push the boundaries of of, um, how WordPress can, like, how WordPress survives, like, from an open source perspective. Because if Wix is so great and so easy to use, and all of a sudden they're like, oh yeah, any, like, go daddy, you can license the Wix builder. Wow. What would happen then?
And at what cost? And then it's the economics game again. At what cost does, does that happen? Does a Wix come in and say, Hey, GoDaddy, it's a bucket website, it's a buck a website for every website you launch with the Wix builder, but then in three years it's uh, five bucks a website, and in, you know, 10 years, it's 10 bucks a website. And at what point? Do you go back to that, to that same struggle of, of economics where GoDaddy goes, Oh, that's interesting.
And they buy in just like any other, like, like we all did with streaming services, Netflix, 10 bucks a month. And we're like, okay, yes, give it to me. Um, and now you're 30 bucks a month for 4k streaming. And you're wondering what the hell happened. So that would be an amazing thing to see. There's no other piece of software that challenges WordPress at that level. Drupal. Kinda. But no other web host is installing a WordPress rival. An open source WordPress rival. None. There isn't any.
Not easy. It doesn't exist. It's definitely not easy.
Yeah.
I wanna, I wanna talk about the marketing before we wrap up. And just get your thoughts. Uh, I, I, Hope we would've talked a lot more about marketing through this episode, but One of the things that came out of it was, Hey, maybe we should be marketing. WordPress better, maybe there should be a consortium, uh, of folks that, you know, put money in a pool and, and advertise, um, or sponsor WordPress. Uh, I've seen stuff like that failed miserably.
Uh, as somebody who grew up in the car industry, my family owned car dealerships, and that was the thing that, how General Motors dealerships used to advertise. is you'd have like this percentage pool and as a smaller dealership in a smaller market against like Boston dealerships, like it was, there was an imbalance. We would put all this money in, but then all the advertising was spent in a much more expensive market, uh, in, in Boston. Of course, this was many, many years ago.
But it was the same kind of thing. You'd have like 15, 20 dealers in a room putting in this money and only two or three of them really getting, um, the benefit of a, of a co marketing budget like this. And we'd be yelling at, or not me, my father would be yelling at General Motors going, this isn't working. How are you going to back, uh, some of this expenses too, which is what we kind of do with like automatic and word camps.
Um, so I've seen that, you know, really, you know, fail miserably from a more biased standpoint as a content creator. I got my hands in the air if you're just listening. We've been here all along. We've been here all along. You know, asking for support and sponsorship dollars for marketing your WordPress products. Um, you know, whether that's through blog posts, newsletter sponsors, videos, like maybe the question is, should the content creators come together?
and form a coalition of here's all the stuff we offer. Finally work together instead of competitively and say, Hey, WordPress product companies, we've been here for a while, support us and we can get this message out instead of, you know, coming up with your own ad dollars and figuring out like who's going to spend what, you know, uh, what are your thoughts on, on the marketing stuff from like a coalition standpoint?
WPCCA, WordPress Content Creators Association. Sounds pretty good.
Oh, you're one of those guys. Sounds pretty good.
Um, I mean, obviously you have way more experience with this than I do, but we've talked a lot and that's, it's something that I'm trying to definitely focus on more of, because I mean, again, I go back to the other thing. I try to be like straight up and logical about it. Like you cannot do the level of stuff. Like creating content is hard, no matter what people think about it or whatever. Like you have to be there.
If you're doing live streams, there's that it's easier if you're good at it or if it comes naturally to you. And that's, and I understand as a, you know, maybe as WordPress or automatic or definitely as like a third party. These, these guys and gals like out here, they're really good like developers. They're really good at like understanding and solving problems. It is very difficult, different and difficult to do marketing as well for your product.
So, you know, if we're talking third party or even just in core, I get it. Like it's a def, it's a completely different skillset than a lot of other things. Um, you know, just as, as like programming would be or whatever.
So, but I think that there, I'm, I'm hopeful with things like the YouTuber, uh, group that Ann has put together there that like, I think it's a sign that there is a little bit more of understanding, like we talked about earlier in the episode here about like what is happening, why this is important, why content creators and like the people in this space, even like media in general, like all of that is important.
Um, you know, putting Jamie at the head of WordPress, we will see how that, that goes ultimately. But I think that at least on the surface, definitely give it, I'll, I'll give it in some ways the benefit of the doubt fully there that like, Jamie is a content guy, a hundred percent about that. Like he is, he said it yesterday on the WP Tonic, like he thinks about that all the time.
Um, so I do think that that mindset is a hundred percent necessary if you want to grow, you know, as a platform, right? Like WordPress as a platform, like that definitely needs to happen. We could talk about the nuances of everything there, obviously, as it relates to the open source and community and everything. But that aside, if we're just talking about marketing, I do think that that's necessary. Uh, that said though.
I also think there's another angle where you definitely can't just have like a central, like this is, this would kind of go against that whole idea of almost like, obviously WordPress isn't necessarily decentralized sort of in the definition of that term, but like, you can't just have it all coming from one place, so to speak. Um, but there is, there's another angle of it. I know I'm contradicting here a little bit where like, okay, we need to have like a, uh, unrelenting.
Whatever, like solid, transparent message for everything like that. I a hundred percent agree with that, but are you going to get a, like a cohesive message together? Like, is that possible? You know what I mean? Like, I don't, I don't know if it is possible. And that's why I feel that WordPress as a whole, because of its nature, and it's not like a corporation, it's not a product, I don't know if you can really have one specific angle that you, that you attack from because.
It literally is different for everyone. It means something different for everyone that, that builds it, which is one of its greatest strengths and potentially greatest weaknesses from a traditional marketing perspective. And, uh, yeah, I don't really have too many answers here. I just think that maybe, maybe one thing could be like a, like a blend of voices coming from the core of it. That's like, Oh, you can use it like this, this, and this.
But at the same time, I go back to it, and I'm contradicting myself again, that I don't think that's what WordPress. org actually, that I don't think that's the philosophy of WordPress. org. And I, and I said this the other day when I was watching Kevin's stream on it, and I was thinking about it, and I was like, at a certain point, if, if this is what the philosophy of WordPress.
org is, you kind of just need to either accept it, or try to influence the change, which we're kind of doing that sort of maybe, I don't know. Um, I know there's a lot of stuff there, but it's, it's not an easy answer. Like there's no way to easily answer this stuff. And if you're going to market something, you need to have what you're going to market and the messaging. But if you can't fully refine that messaging, how do you market it? Yeah. So it's not an easy, it's not an easy situation.
Have I
ever shared the, uh, what would you do with the keys to the kingdom blog post? Um, no, I've only heard you say that like 15 times, uh, on a, on a more serious note, like. I, I, I believe Miriam is calling for a sort of, um, I don't know, not unofficial, an official sort of chat, uh, around Contributor Day on the marketing, uh, for the marketing stuff coming up at WordCamp US.
Here's the only thing that I would say is, it cannot be, and, and probably technically cannot be, but, Emotionally, it cannot be my own opinion. And I think technically cannot be part of the make marketing team because I think the make marketing team is officially just frozen. Uh, we'll get more insights to that from Josefa at the media core meeting in a couple of weeks. Uh, but technically, like, I don't think we can officially corral around having another make marketing team.
Um, I don't think it will be supported by, by Josefa and, and company. Because they're trying the MediaCore experiment right now. So I would urge us not to do that. Or try for that again. Because what, what we're going to run into is the same exact limitations and frustrations with the marketing team for many years. No access. No data. You don't work directly with a product team. Like some of the best marketing teams work directly with the product teams of a company.
Uh, how can you not work with a product team hand in hand on a successful marketing team knowing what's coming, knowing how the users want to use it, working with users, working with brand messaging, working with data. That is the, the basis of a great marketing company. Um, or a great marketing team, I should say. And we're just going to fall victim to that again if we try to make the official Make Marketing team again.
Having said that, what, what can and should be done with this coalition is to get boots on the ground for exactly what you were saying and build up the, build up their own set of data, which I know is extremely difficult, but this is why this is extremely difficult, is boots on the ground for all those avatars that use WordPress. So, I don't know.
Theoretically, let's say it's Elementor, um, it's Gravity Forms, it's Barn2 Plugins with their e commerce plugins, whatever, there's another company in there, an agency. So you have these four, like, types of people. You have people who are page builder users, you have people who are form users, you have people who are e commerce users.
In this coalition, the dollars should be spent either with WordPress media companies, or boots on the ground getting those stories from the actual users so that you can identify how these people use WordPress. Because you're absolutely right. You can't just have one marketing message for WordPress because it's fucking a million different things to a million different people. So you got to build the marketing stories for the bloggers, for the e commerce people, for the page, for the web.
page builder people for the form builders, like how these different people implement this software. That's where the time should be spent and then bubble that up into your little tactical advertisements that way. Because if you're trying to do it the make way, it's just, I, I, I, I think it's, it would be destined to fail again for all the same reasons we've already seen it fail. And if it's just like, how do we promote WordPress at large?
That's also destined to fail because there's just so many different ways that people can use WordPress. And inevitably you're going to alienate somebody's message. Whether it's the product company who's putting money into this marketing machine for you. And they go, hey man, I'm a page builder. You're not even talking to any, you're not making any page builder ads. They're gonna freak out about that. And you're gonna forget the end user.
Who is the page builder user who's going, you keep telling me I can sell stuff on this WordPress website. I don't care. I just wanna build my website. You know? So
yeah, I think just one more thought on that. I think that, uh, I am optimistic, like overall in general, I think there's a lot of really good things obviously still going and all the other stuff we talked about specifically on that point though. I would say that I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic, but I'm super skeptical just from what I've heard, like specifically recently, just because I don't, I don't have long term experience.
but like, I don't, I'm not convinced right now that, you know, the people that could make that call, so to speak, actually want that to be the outward, outward perspective of what WordPress is. Like I can't fully wrap my head around that yet. Like, I, I don't, I don't, I don't believe it. Like, I don't believe that, you know, like page builders need to shine, like, like maybe e commerce to an extent with like WooCommerce.
But I just don't know if that's, I hope differently because that is the huge strength of WordPress, but I'm not sure, like, and you can tell me, has that ever been at the forefront of like, I'll make up a scenario, Matt Mullenwig is like speaking or whatever. And has he ever said, I'm sure he said, Oh, we got like millions of plugins and shit like that or whatever. But as he ever said, like, go use a page builder to build your website or like go use something else.
Like, I feel like it's, it's never, the third party is mentioned.
I could be completely wrong, but is, has the third party ecosystem, which is the vast majority of those avatars that you're talking about in some ways, like, is that ever brought up to that extent or is it always just like core Gutenberg, very extensible, which are all good points, but they just don't, when you're talking about like an actual market strategy for those different avatars, it's not going to hit everyone exactly just with those points. Then that makes sense.
Yeah, no, it does. Um, and that's why I say it can't be done. So this is, that's a perfect reason why it can't be done through the official make channels, right? So if anyone's, I guess this is just my opinion, but if folks are thinking, oh, we'll make a new, make marketing technically and emotionally, I don't think it's going to happen. It shouldn't, it shouldn't happen because you're going to run into these same things. Um, No, it's never been done before.
Again, because marketing and the WordPress stuff hasn't really ever been able to get off the ground. I mean, they just sat on the runway for years. Um, I pulled up the WordPress. com site. Because again, I look for these canaries in the coal mine of, of how we get these indicators. I, I know we want to talk to people all the time. I, you know, have built a career on theorycrafting this stuff. And they've actually updated, uh, the wordpress. com site. Because I often look at the wordpress.
com site to see what their marketing message is. Because, you know, there is no official marketing team. And if one is to guess what Automatic is thinking about marketing WordPress, Well, you look at wordpress. com and how they're positioning, um, How they're positioning WordPress. I used to really poke fun at WordPress. com homepage because it, I'll have to go to the archive. I probably should do that. So I'm not doing like a Joe Rogan and just saying shit and it's not real.
Um, but it, it used to just say something like WordPress your way and maybe kind of close to this. Like WordPress without limits. That still means that the user landing here knows what WordPress is. Right? Like the, like if somebody's like, I want to build a website, you say, go to wordpress. com, and you go, okay, they go to wordpress. without limits. But I want to build a bakery website Right that doesn't speak that doesn't speak to let's take a look at Wix.
com create a website without limits Hilarious I'm gonna have to assume Wix. Oh, man. What an amazing thing that we just discovered live even though we're just amazing Um, so WordPress without limits. Uh, create a website without limits. This is 100%. Yeah, I mean, squarespace. com I will cry, I will cry. Designed to sell. That's so weird. Right, which is going, that's, that's, that's Squarespace saying They're
going after, they're going after Shopify.
Yeah, they're going after Shopify. They're going after the customer that's going to have the most value. They're not saying, I don't care about these people who want to build a stupid website. I want a, I want a customer who's going to sell stuff because that's going to be my best, my best customer. Um, and then Shopify. Oops.
That's amazing.
Making commerce better for everyone.
Wow.
You know, and this is the thing, like, so right here. And, you know, any, any marketer worth their salt knows this. Shopify. Humans, humans doing things right here. When you look at Squarespace and Wix ads, it's humans doing something. It's never about, Hey, look at this cool tool of dragging and dropping stuff. It's humans doing stuff with our software that with the end result, right? I'm building my business. Here's stories about my business.
This is that human factor that I'm urging this future coalition to go after. are you
saying though that the coalition is outside? It's a, it's a completely external thing because it has, I think that it has, I think it's, it does solve certain problems, but obviously if we're talking money, if we go back to the money thing, like, is that something that like automatic would be interested in like sponsoring extern?
I don't know how that structure actually ever works or is that something that like, like Again, we've, we've had recent live streams, like where does the, is there a budget for that? Or is that going to end up being like, uh, that the, it makes money for itself somehow?
Number one, this is just like a, an idea that Miriam came up with, uh, or Miriam and the group came up with on that phone call. Who knows if this is actually going to come to fruition. And if it is, it's going to take, you know, months, if not, uh, almost a year. This is why I think the creators should, we should come up with something.
More concrete to offer, um, because it does get like really murky, uh, this way where, uh, if you have, you know, Elementor putting in 5, 000 bucks and somebody coming in and putting in 500 bucks, like whose message, you know, dominates that where I think if like three or four creators came together and said, Hey, look, we get this great idea for a series. And everybody puts in X, Y, Z amount of dollars, and it's all just presented by Elementor, Barn2Plugins, Gravity Forms.
It's just way cleaner, I think, of a deal to do it that way than a consortium trying to like, figure out where to spend ad revenue. Um, but anyway, I, the point is, is like, just a little germ of an idea right now, and I think if it is to expand, it should live outside of, the Make WordPress marketing team, because technically I don't think it's available, and two, uh, I don't, uh, I think it'll just run up into the same limitations if it's part of the open source initiative.
Many people aren't gonna like that for those reasons, but, um, I think that's the only way it's gonna succeed.
Yeah, I mean, I'd be interested in talking about more of that, but we can kind of wrap up. My only thing would be, my two questions would be, how does it look like actually I want to say like entity wise, but like, what would that be? Like, it's, it's totally different thing. I mean, I was kidding about the, the, you know, the players association type thing, but that kind of actually seems somewhat synonymous to an extent.
But, um, and, but the other thing is like, well, how do you, what do you message? Like what, there's gotta still be a message there. Cause that's this problem we're trying to solve. Yeah. So like, is it just like WordPress is great. Like, you know, cause yeah, you know, that's what
I mean. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like you, it has to be boots on the ground, building a strategy for the different avatars of WordPress user, which there are might be like, I don't know, maybe six to a dozen big ways.
It could be, it could be for everyone. Like WordPress is for everyone. Like, well, there's definitely ways to poke holes in that. You could say that, but you can't stop there. Like you have to like say WordPress for everyone. And then like have, like you said, like.
multiple different avatars that you could immediately say, basically pick one, pick one of these that defines you and we'll tell you exactly how you would, not exactly how you would run WordPress, but like how people like you would use WordPress. Yeah. That's gotta be how it is. And I'm not sure why that's not happened. I it's probably gotta be just because it's more of like a laissez faire. Like we're not gonna, we're not gonna dive into this at all and tell you guys what to do.
Like this is just, this is what it is. Like just, just, It's really great. Just trust us. Go in there and just, you know, fuck around. Yeah, but where do you
put, so that's the thing. So where do you put that messaging? So I have a video coming out that Brian Kordes and I recorded yesterday, which you should really enjoy. We broke out a whole bunch, so it'll be, no, this video will be live. Our video that we're recording right now will be live before the Brian episode. So it's, Here's all the topics we covered. Open Source, GPL, WordPress Beginnings Evolution, Matt Mullenweg, Automatic, Automatic Products, WordPress. com, WPCloud, WordPress.
org, Openverse, Five for the Future, Audrey Capital, WP Tavern, Jose De Jampolsi, WordPress Foundation, WordCamps and Meetups, Core Contributors, GitHub Make vs Slack, WooThemes, and WooCommerce. We went through every single one of those, and broke it out, um, as far as we understand it. And we still didn't. Touch on a lot of different areas, uh, for WordPress. But we broke down like everything we knew about those different things. And when you look at wordpress.
org, you're like, once we started breaking it apart, there's a shit ton of stuff on wordpress. org tons of stuff. Tons. I mean, open verse five for the future, all this stuff. Um, you know, your profiles, your forums, uh, the photo directory, there's just like so much stuff on that site. So if you have a marketing team, where, where's the centralized messaging that goes out for a open source contributing marketing team? There isn't one, right? Which is the challenge.
And if there is, if you say it's the homepage of wordpress. org, well, that is running up a hill because you now have to. Ask the powers that be to make those changes. And that is a very sensitive page for the overall project. So it was Matt going to just say yes to a bunch of volunteers that go, Hey, I got some great ideas for our homepage now. Probably not. I don't blame them either. You know? So where do you put out that centralized messaging? One idea.
So, and look, when you start bringing groups of people in and you start talking about money, it's going to freaking make this thing go so slow. Cause everyone's going to want to say, rightfully so. Everyone's going to need to, you know, read the room, figure out who's going to get what out of this deal. How much is this going to cost? Who's going to wrangle the money? How are we going to account for it?
One of the easiest things that people can do is come up with this, um, solidified message, like you're saying, like maybe WordPress is great at the start. And we adopt that into your five for the, the things that already exist. Like when I evaluate a problem, what structures already exist that we can leverage now? Are they useful? Yes or no? And then if yes, let's use the stuff we already have in place so we're not creating a whole new wheel like a marketing coalition.
So you could say, you know what, there's a new thing we're coming up with for five for the future. Everybody writes. A blog post about why WordPress is great or what WordPress means to me. So does everyone buy into this? How many of you out there buy into this? 20 of you, two of you, a hundred of you. If so, one, one day out of the month, you all write a blog post about why WordPress is great. That's how we're giving back to the marketing wheel without money and without muddying the waters.
And it lives inside five for the future, a structure that already exists. Next month, write a blog post about why WordPress is great for e commerce. And we're all just pledging to amplifying and making WordPress thrive. That's what I got.
Interesting. Um, I mean, it's an idea. I don't know if there's no money in this. I don't want to hear it. Well, honestly, I mean, I was kind of going that route, but like, I mean, I don't know who we have to run this, what we would have to run that by nothing for the five for the
future. That's the great thing. So there's no, it's just a call, a call to action and say, who wants to do it? Everybody pledge your time this month. And then, yeah, okay. Maybe it takes somebody like you and me to, Just from a, a promotional purpose, like, okay, on this, we're tracking all these blog posts. Here's all the cool people who contributed to this idea. Maybe that's something that we can do.
I mean, I don't know, haven't really thought about it, just heard it. But, I, I would, I would question like, Not everything has to
result in, in profit, Mark.
No, that's not it. You just gotta, you just gotta make money somehow. I mean, cause you got to live because you can't do everything for free. So like, how do you, how, what, what, but regardless of the money thing, that's one concern, where does that, how does that tangibly move the needle?
Well, you have a lot more, again, you have to remember this is not, you could also make the case if all of a sudden five companies came together, raise a hundred thousand dollars and put a hundred thousand dollars out into. advertising and content, right? Like, how, how does that move the needle?
Um, I think that because this is a, a lower barrier to entry, like, we're just asking everyone this month for the part of your Five for the Future of Marketing WordPress to write about your, you know, the first time you ever used WordPress. Let's just, I'm just using that as a topic idea, but hey, everyone that's involved with this, to AMP WordPress, write about your first time experiencing WordPress. And everybody, and they get like 20 different stories out there.
Just 20 more chances of impact. Next month it's, let's talk about why WordPress is great for the e commerce. Everybody writes one blog, like minimally. Like we're just, we're just minimally just setting the bar to say, just at least do this. Like if we want to improve marketing before we get to consortiums and who's got the money and who gets what, let's just start with that man. Let's get this message out there. And just see how that goes. And see how many people are actually bought into this.
If it amplifies, it amplifies. If it doesn't, you know, it doesn't. Um, it's just an easier takeoff in my opinion. Yeah.
I mean, I personally would be much more willing to make a video than write. Well, whatever. I mean, yeah, but I mean, I don't know. That's an idea. I would, I'd love to get other opinions on that. So if you guys are listening, you let me know. Um, but yeah, I mean, I don't know. We'll, we'll workshop that. We'll think maybe we'll run that off the flagpole to some, I don't know.
He's Mark Zemanski. You can find him at markzemanski. co, mjs. bio. He's got a bunch of websites launching. He's got a YouTube channel. His number one course is 100 percent free. If you want to learn about dynamic WordPress data. Right? You go to Mark's YouTube channel. Again, you can find the links at mjs. bio. Um, we're always asking for money here at the WP Minute. If you want to support us and sponsor the work that we do, uh, talking about WordPress, head on over to the WPMinute.
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