Alexia Tsot­sis of TechCrunch inter­views Matt Mul­len­weg, Founder of Word­Press and Toni Schnei­der, CEO of Automattic

What are the chal­lenges of build­ing a viable busi­ness off some­thing that is open source?

Actu­ally, the chal­lenge was cre­at­ing a busi­ness that would not kill the open source project.

Just how big is WordPress?

There are about 30 mil­lion Word­Press blogs, or about 10% of all blogs, half of which are hosted by Word­Press. The audi­ence across these blogs is about 300 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors per month and the growth is accel­er­at­ing. For exam­ple, it took Word­Press 18 months to reach the first mil­lion blogs; the last mil­lion took just 35 days. In fact, when you account for all self-hosted blogs, WordPress’s audi­ence is “Facebook-sized” … but it’s spread out across the web.

“Blog­ging hasn’t found its adwords yet … its break­out prod­uct … and we are still look­ing for that,” says Matt. Their main rev­enue model is pre­mium ser­vices, such as buy­ing a domain, spam pro­tec­tion, etc. At the high end of the pre­mium ser­vices is VIP host­ing, like for TechCrunch, CNN, and other large media properties.

Their goal is not to be acquired, for many rea­sons, but impor­tantly also because they believe the web needs an inde­pen­dent plat­form for pub­lish­ing. If it weren’t Word­Press, another open source CMS would fill that space. The web needs some­thing open.

Favorite plu­gin? WP-Typography.

matt mul­len­weg, word­press, leweb, leweb10