Automattic expects to make $45 million in revenue this year

http://allthingsd.com/20120425/automattic-grows-up-the-company-behind-wordpress-com-shares-revenue-numbers-and-hires-execs/

by krogsgard • 14 years ago

44 16 14 years ago

allthingsd.com

sudonim• 14 years ago

"The company is profitable, and expects to bring in $45 million in revenue this year, according to CEO Toni Schneider and founder Matt Mullenweg."

What's hiding behind that revenue number. The co. is "profitable". Is the company going to make $10 in profit or $10 million in profit this year?

krogsgard5• 14 years ago

Well, they're completely distributed with little physical overhead. With 100 employees and the only other primary cost being servers, I'd guess they're doing alright.

codinghorror• 14 years ago

Isn't employee salary the #1 expense for most tech companies? And isn't the rule of thumb about $160,000 per year per employee on average, and that's assuming high-end engineer types? By that metric they'd need $16 million per year just to pay salaries. $45 million income is 2.8 times what's needed for salaries, which leaves plenty for profit.

huggyface2• 14 years ago

That's a magnificent $0.65 a blog...per year...in gross revenue.

webwright• 14 years ago

They are still trading revenue for growth... For consumer companies, that's a pretty well trodden path. There's value creation and value extraction. I can say, knowing some folks at WordPress, that they've been utterly focused on value creation since the get-go (makes sense given that they doubled the # of blogs they host in the past year). As the article states, they just hired a CFO and a general counsel. Money quote (literally):

"West will be in charge of all things financial and operational. “When you see this much usage, you know there’s an extraordinary revenue opportunity,” he told me."

zaidf• 14 years ago

Silly semantics.

You could also see it as a magnificent $0.65 per page. After all, a blog is just a dynamic page outputting database records, right?

huggyface2• 14 years ago

You could also see it as a magnificent $0.65 per page.

Well...no. Not at all. It isn't semantics at all, anymore than saying that The McClatchy Company operates 30 newspapers.

Further the other comment opines that they're focused on growth. That seems incredible given that the blogging industry is on decline.

webwanderings2• 14 years ago

I highlighted their difference with Tumblr here not too long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3809374

They both use Quantcast, so the numbers have to be pretty accurate.

krogsgard5• 14 years ago

A lot of Tumblr pageviews are dashboard based, whereas WordPress.com's tend to be much more front facing. Also, I imagine the amount of time a Tumblr user spends per page is less than those on WP - just by typical nature of the content. Just guessing, but that's my assumption.

Mullenweg has said before he pictures Tumblr as more of a social network than a blogging platform. I wish I could find that right now. Either way, WordPress.com is definitely learning some things from Tumblr. The new wp.com dashboard and quick posting mechanism is enough proof of that.

webwanderings2• 14 years ago

You are right, hence the reason they redirected the dashboard stats to wordpress.com. I think they're gunning for an IPO or sale.

freshhawk• 14 years ago

How on earth do they keep such low turnover when these people have to work with the wordpress codebase?

Black Magic? Holding their families hostage?

Seriously though: I'm very interested in how they manage this company and the distributed employees as they are obviously doing a lot of things right.

krogsgard5• 14 years ago

Every employee at Automattic has a trial period before they announce they've been hired. It usually includes a test project for designers and programmers. I'm sure that's a helpful filter. Then, when the employee starts, they spend some amount of time (I think a couple weeks) doing support, no matter what their actual job is.

'm sure working from home helps limit turnover too. Also, they work in teams, and I'm sure that's fun. And I've never noticed anyone mention things like logging time either - I think they get assigned work and as long as you get it done, time isn't an issue.

And finally the people that work for Automattic tend to be really really passionate about WordPress in the first place, so I'm sure working for the most influential company to the WordPress.org project(Automattic / wp.com), doing WordPress stuff all day, is pretty awesome.

cfinke• 14 years ago

As an Automattician: yes to all of the above.

Also, I get to work with really smart people that are driven to improve themselves, their co-workers, and the company's products. That's the #1 reason for the low turnover.

Automattic expects to make $45 million in revenue this year

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