Google taken to the Matt
Matt Mullenweg is softspoken and young — he turned 25 on Sunday — but his ambitious blogging platform is the fastest growing in the world in terms of usage.
Since 2005, Mullenweg, a college dropout from Houston, has built a lean and profitable San Francisco Internet company, Automattic, around that platform, called WordPress. A passionate community of open source code-writers is helping to develop its offerings and generate buzz among the technorati.
Automattic’s WordPress is used by 13.5 million bloggers, and it is the preferred platform for numerous high-profile tech bloggers.
“That’s pretty cool,” said the understated Mullenweg, a self-taught software engineer who mostly works out of his South of Market apartment. His privately held company, Automattic (get it — MATT), which does not disclose revenue, but which he said operates profitably, makes money by selling anti-spam software, charging for premium services and by selling advertising, among other things. It got $1.1 million in early funding and a roughly $30 million round of venture capital last year, with The New York Times Co. becoming an investor. It has 35 employees who mostly work from home — spread across the United States and Europe — and will hire 10 to 20 people this year. Former OddPost CEO and Yahoo Senior Executive Toni Schneider is CEO.
WordPress is still dwarfed by Google’s Blogger service, which Google bought in 2003, the same year Mullenweg was a University of Houston political science undergrad working on blogging software simply because he wanted to improve his own online experience.
But traffic to WordPress sites is growing faster than for Blogger, and it is significantly outstripping that of its nearest competitor, SixApart Ltd., which is also based in San Francisco and started operating in August of 2003.
Paul Verna, a senior analyst at EMarketer who studies social media, called Mullenweg “quite an entrepreneur and visionary,” and he said the tides seem to be moving in his favor.
“It’s a little bit like what we started seeing with Facebook a year, year and a half ago, with the momentum building. Suddenly people were talking about Facebook and less about MySpace. WordPress has a similar cachet and buzz building about it,” Verna said.
Anil Dash, a SixApart vice president who has clashed with Mullenweg publicly in the past, said his company sees WordPress’ success as positive for blogging in general, and his company in fact makes money by selling advertising for some blogs run on WordPress.
“Candidly, he’s 25 years old, he’s had a lot of success,” Dash said. “It’s great to be motivated. I think the motivation has to be what am I doing that’s benefiting people, not what’s benefiting me. The benefit is getting people blogging.”
SixApart has been growing as well, and has responded to the WordPress juggernaut by offering up an open source version of its blogging software, Moveable Type. SixApart ended 2008 with nearly 200 employees, a net gain of 50 employees, after laying off 8 percent of the staff in November.
In 2008, U.S. traffic to WordPress sites rose 64 percent, from 36.5 million in December 2007 to 46.7 million unique monthly visitors last month, according to ComScore. Traffic to Blogger sites rose 20 percent, from 69.6 million unique visitors a month to 83.6 million during the same period. SixApart’s traffic rose 21 percent, from 11.9 million unique monthly visitors to 14.4 million.
Worldwide, the story was the same, with WordPress’s share rising 59 percent from 72.3 million unique monthly visitors to 115.1 million visitors from November to November, the latest month for which figures were available. Blogger rose 44 percent, going from 153.5 million to 221.5 million visitors, while SixApart rose from 37 million to 45.6 million, or 23 percent.
Mullenweg is quick to cite high-profile clients — like the Wall Street Journal, Fox, CNN, Time and People — and client defections from SixApart to WordPress. He credits WordPress’ growth to its near total reliance on open source code and its community-driven functionality — much of which is generated at “WordCamp” workshops regularly held in cities around the world.
“It’s a movement, and that doesn’t happen very often,” said Tony Conrad, a principal at True Ventures, Automattic’s main investor, recalling how when he visited the South-By-Southwest festival in Austin with Mullenweg, the two of them attended a party organized by local WordPress enthusiasts without any help from Automattic.
Automattic recently leased a classic startup space in a pier building on San Francisco’s waterfront. Last year, Automattic bought two companies, Intense Debate and Poll Daddy, a commenting service and web site polling service, respectively. It also acquired Gravatar in late 2007, allowing bloggers to use avatars.
Mullenweg said he finally decided in November to rent office space for weekly meetings and community events because it became awkward gathering in True Ventures’ offices next door.
Mullenweg said he often hires people he has already known writing code online, and he did not even know how to pronounce one of his first employees names until after he was on staff.
“It’s almost like hiring a friend,” he said.
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