[AznHisoka]

Does anyone else see a misalignment between the $3B valuation and the huge impact Wordpress has had on the internet? 1/3 of all websites are powered by Wordpress, yet they seem to be valued low compared to other tech companies.

[013a]

Linux powers most of the web servers on the internet. The Linux Foundation is not worth billions of dollars.

All of those servers run on Intel chips. Maybe some AMD. Even combined, companies like Google and Amazon, who would be nothing without those chips, are worth more than the companies that make their chips.

And electricity! Our electric companies aren't worth a penny compared to these huge tech companies. That's strange. They wouldn't even be able to see, let alone run their computers, without the electric company.

[goatinaboat]

The Linux Foundation is not worth billions of dollars

IBM paid billions of dollars for Red Hat.

[jononor]

And most of the webservers on the Internet does not run Redhat.

[tyingq]

Pretty sure the vast majority of those WordPress sites bring them no revenue.

[johnward]

Since when has valuation been based on revenue? :)

[buboard]

au contraire, i bet wordpress users make a lot more revenue than SV combined (not a high bar - most SV startups lose money)

[tyingq]

Right, but they probably get close to zero from the self-hosted WordPress users. The revenue is from people paying WordPress.com to host their sites. That's the number of users that's relevant, and it's a much smaller number. The self-hosted users that are the majority don't count for much.

[dwd]

On the self-hosted side they probably make a reasonable amount on premium licensing for WooCommerce addons in the WooCommerce marketplace as well as JetPack & Akismet.

[buboard]

I mean wordpress in general, not just wordpress.com

[lexapro]

I'm sure Apple alone has more revenue than all wordpress sites combined.

And you can have a lot of revenue while losing money.

[buboard]

Yes of course, i should have said “their competitors in sv”

Woocommerce users apparently make $10b in revenue, and i doubt they lose much, after all it s free

[badrequest]

They don't make that revenue on behalf of the folks who make Wordpress, necessarily

[user5994461]

All these sites get ads that should make a ton of revenues for WordPress.

[hobofan]

The less value you capture as tech provider, the more value is captured by your customers and allows them to strive, so it makes a lot of sense to me.

[csomar]

My understanding is that Automattic owns WordPress.com and not WordPress.org.

i.e: You can be in Automattic business and make a dev team larger than them that develop the core WordPress. They don't rule WordPress the open source product but just are a company that made it.

[srbby]

Interesting that "whois wordpress.org" doesn't show who owns it.

[TotempaaltJ]

It's the WordPress foundation. It's on Wikipedia.

[helpPeople]

Open source has massive benefits. WordPress would be nothing if it was closed off.

But open source also means users can fork if the company sucks.

[mitchdoogle]

Usage doesn't mean much if you don't have the users' data.

[buboard]

Their product is not their stock, it's their code.

[onetimemanytime]

a billion used to mean something, once upon a time.