Just Wow.

Welcome back to WP Trends. Could the WordPress acquisition situation get any crazier?

They Keep Coming

Since I last emailed (yes, it's been a while) things have gotten even crazier in the WordPress acquisition space. We've seen some big ones:

• Yoast bought by NewfoldDigital
• LearnDash bought by StellarWP (LiquidWeb)
• Sandhills Dev (EDD, AffiliateWP etc) bought by Awesome Motive
• Pagely bought by GoDaddy
• Modern Tribe (WordPress agency) bought LiquidWeb

There's been a lot of chatter in the community about how the market is being consolidated rapidly, moving towards an ecosystem that's dominated by 4-5 big players, and it's generally viewed as a bad thing. 

I understand the concerns but I've resigned myself to it. It's inevitable, a sign of the maturing marketplace, but I don't see it as the end of opportunities for smaller companies. Quite the opposite. Big plugins that have been swallowed up by big players will move slower. This makes room for faster, scrappier competitors that can improve on existing products.

Mark Zahra from WP Mayor wrote a good piece on the future of WordPress companies that's worth a read.

There's also another side to this that I think gets easily forgotten. These sales aren't a result of big bad companies strong arming poor little companies into a sale. All the companies who have sold recently have been around for years, grinding, improving WordPress, supporting large numbers of employees. Selling their company is unlocking the ultimate achievement in business; their company can live on, continuing to support its customers, whilst the founders gain financial security and reward for all their hard work.

For Joost, selling meant relieving the pressure of running a business, compounded during COVID.

For Pippin, it allowed him to finally step away and focus on his passions outside of WordPress.

Yes WordPress is changing, yes the community feels different, yes aquisitions are happening, but it's worth remembering the acquisitions are on the whole a good thing, especially for those that sold.

WooCommerce Marketplace Changes

In June I wrote about the changes Shopify has made to the commission structure for app developers, which contrasted strongly to the WooCommerce marketplace structure.

Evidently Automattic were taking note of the Shopify changes and have made their own adjustments. In an email sent to WooCommerce developers in October, they state:

"Starting November 1, all products will become non-exclusive, with partners receiving a 70% revenue share."

This is big news for developers. It allows them to sell on other channels - their own sites being the most important, and the revenue bump will help them grow. With the lack of proper marketplace for premium WordPress products, Automattic is clearly trying to further solidify their place as the de facto WooCommerce plugin marketplace.

Data Deep Dive

Although problematic as a ranking factor for plugins on the WordPress.org repository, the resolved support tickets metric is a way that plugins can improve their position in search results. Although some plugins completely ignore the support forum for their free plugins, I thought it would be interesting to dive into the support received and support resolved numbers of plugins on the repo and see if there are any opportunities for plugin developers.

I've got a dataset of over 45,746 plugins taken on 23rd September to look at. The WordPress.org data for support threads received and resolved is for the previous two months.

29,041 of those have zero support threads.

The average percentage of support threads resolved for plugins with 1 or more threads is 24%.

I then had a look at all the plugins with 10 or more threads to see if there are a large number of plugins that don't respond to support tickets.

There are 587 plugins with 10 or more threads and 65% of those plugins have resolved more than half their support threads. There seems to be a good deal of plugins that are actively tackling support.

With regards to ranking, it's clear support resolved is only a partial indicator for the search algorithm, as Contact Form 7 is the plugin with the both the highest threads received and lowest percentage resolved. Yet it still ranks in the top position for 'contact form'.

Acquisition Opportunities

There are currently 19 listings on FlipWP.

All are plugins for sale, with a good range of 4 to high 7 figure asking prices. You can get a flavour of the listings on the homepage.

Yesterday I sent out an acquisition opportunity about AccessAlly  However, the Flippa listing is fake. The numbers didn't stack up and after reaching out to the the AccessAlly owner, she confirmed it and has contacted Flippa to remove the listing. 

It's unfortunate I didn't do my due diligence further on this before sharing. But I'm also curious as to why someone would do this on Flippa - to what end?

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. If you have any feedback about the newsletter or want to chat about the WordPress ecosystem, I'd love to hear from you - just hit reply.

Till next time 👋

Cheers,

Iain Poulson Founder of WP Trends