
WordPress Plugin Developers Get The Shaft, Donations Are 0.1% Of All Downloads - foppr
http://tomuse.com/wp-plugins-developer-business-model/
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patio11
Donations are not a business model. Its putting out a tip cup and hoping money
falls into it. Tip cups do not have a curious property in physics that causes
money to be attracted to them.

I do downloadable software, of the "makes people substantially less money than
Wordpress" variety. Roughly 1.8% of downloads result in people paying me
money. The average paid me is, I say without fear of contradiction, far above
the average donation any Wordpress developer with a significant amount of
donations has received. (Edit to add: here's a point of reference. Back when
MoveableType was donationware, the average donation was 38. Cents.)

When you offer something for donations, you're saying "It would be REALLY NICE
if you could put ANY money into this here tip cup because, as you know, almost
nobody will. That $1 there, that makes you a better person than 99.9% of the
public." This is a cruddy frame of mind to put your I-can't-believe-its-not-a-
customer into from the perspective of separating them from their money.

When you offer stuff for sale, you say "It would be TOTALLY MANDATORY that you
pay me exact what it says on the sticker for this here thing. Everybody pays
for it, except thieves. [In point of fact 98.2% of people do not pay for it,
but I don't clobber my users over the head with that fact, now do I.] Offering
to pay me $1 for it doesn't make you nice, it makes you a _cheapskate_ and
parasite on society." (And the best part is you never have to tell people this
because _they already know_.)

There are people who do well with donations. Rick Brewster of Paint.NET is the
only one who springs readily to mind for me. He pushes the donations fairly
aggressively (+) and distributes a program which is probably competitive with
some of Adobe's low-end consumer offerings.

\+ Another problem with donations: they fail quite frequently because people
are embarrassed to ask for money, like they feel they are doing something
wrong. So they bury the tip cup out of the way and don't aggressively promote
it within the application, for fear of being thought poorly of by cheapskates
who think $1 is too much to pay for $APP. People with this philosophy will
never be mollified, and charging money from the getgo means you never have to
worry about what they think of you.

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foppr
Joost de Valk seems to be pushing donations pretty hard yet his donation rate
is 0.1%.

Do you know what kind of donate rate Rick Brewster is able to achieve?

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patio11
Previously, in a comment on my blog, he mentioned that Bingo Card Creator has
a higher conversion rate by "more than an order of magnitude" from him, which
would imply his donation rate was at the time below .2%

He prefers to be circumspect with regards to exactly how much money he makes.
As I respect his privacy, I will not elaborate further on my earlier comment
that he does quite well with donations.

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bengtan
There is a difference between what people want, and what the legalities are.
Premium plugins doesn't have a sustainable foundation since they have to be
GPL. What's to stop me from buying a so-called premium plugin, and then re-
selling it to someone else, or giving it away for free? The GPL explicitly
allows me this freedom.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I see it, it doesn't matter how many people
believe premium plugins are the way to go. The GPL license will still
undermine it. Unless WordPress is re-released under a non-GPL license. I'm not
sure this is doable though.

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chanux
This reminds me the recent HN news item saying "Non profits kill the
innovation". But this article makes me think that things are even worse than
that. Wordpress should do something to change this I guess.

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foppr
Yes, it definitely seems unfair for the plugin developers to do all the work
and receive very little compensation for all their time.

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jimboyoungblood
I disagree- it just reflects what the market value of a wordpress plugin is.
Anyone who feels they're not fairly rewarded can just stop doing it. Nobody is
forcing them to do the work.

Besides, they most likely have motivations other than money- there's no way
anyone starts making wordpress plugins thinking they're going to get rich (at
least I hope not!)

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tomjen
It doesn't reflect the value of a wordpress plugin, since the value of an item
is the most the market will pay for it before going for an alternative.

The only thing this price means is that it is difficult to make money by
giving away stuff for free.

