The Market for “Premium” Plugins

In the past year, and especially recently, a market has begun to develop for what you might coin as “premium” or “paid” plugins. Much like the market that exists for premium themes, there will be disputes from various community members, should more people begin to pursue a different form of benefitting from their work and efforts.

A recent post on ToMuse by Kevin Eklund sums up some ways that the business model could be created, although I will be providing some of my own input into this, not necessarily based on the open-source community, but more around what people are looking for when they install a plugin.

Currently, the main ways that plugin developers and creators make money is through donations. With all forms of donations, they usually don’t amount to much, unless there are campaigns to help support the developer, and this rarely happens. Plugin authors usually see problems trying to continue support for their plugins, especially as new features are added to WordPress that make a continuance of the plugin not worthwhile.

Suggest ways that he writes about are: 1) premium plugins, 2) freemium plugins, 3) paid support, 4), ad supported, and 5) a combination model.

WordPress Isn’t Free

Even though a lot of work on WordPress is done through an open-source business model, the team must raise money to continue operation, and plugin developers are left out of this. Assuming that WordPress can generate more revenue, people who side with WordPress in the promotion of the service (more so WordPress.com, which is somewhat ad-supported) could see some return in their efforts. This model might not work properly, as it is quite difficult to track how many people sign up for either WordPress.com or download and use WordPress.org based on plugins that they like before trying them out.

Some would also say that support isn’t free for WordPress, either. In order to find out how to tweak some of the settings, you may have to consult with people more familiar with the service, who may charge for their work. Sure, there is an expansive database full of code that you can use, but if you are starting your first blog, it can be a struggle to begin to edit the ~5MB+ worth of code that comes with each WP installation.

Time, Usefulness, and Expenses

I will present the argument for premium/paid/ad-supported plugins for two groups of bloggers – those who receive compensation for their time and those who use WordPress.org for their personal blogs.

Personal Bloggers – When someone sets up a personal blog, they typically resort to the very basic plugins — anti-spam, related posts, Twitter/social integration for sharing, miscellaneous widgets, and possibly a contact/comment form plugin to extend the usefulness of these areas.

Unless they have some goals with the site, as in promoting themselves online, which only a few do (most use a personal site to promote side projects and books/products/other blogs), they don’t have much time and additional income to put into paying for additional items, let alone a premium plugin.

99% of the plugins out there can do what they want without added configuration. This is great if they want to use WordPress as a more powerful, yet still easy-to-use system for writing posts and managing their content.

Commercial Bloggers – These are the people who want a more complete solution, one that works for them as a custom solution. Especially true as you work up the website ladder, these people also have more time and can spend more income for solutions that have been adapted to suit their blog.

Many would rather spend $50 or more on premium themes, plugins, and services that allow them to save time and effort down the road, not having to use multiple plugins to perform one task.

For example, while there may be a few solutions to properly integrate forums into your blog, only a small percentage of them will work for people who want the complete, custom look. Others will require advanced editing before their members can even sign into the forum without going through complicated systems.

Why Monetary Support is Crucial

While there are paid plugins available that can perform similar functionality to the free counterparts, you “often” don’t see the same level of support and “free” customization that the paid developers are able to offer. In saying “often,” there are in fact cases where you see better support for free plugins, better compatibility and more advanced, back-end control of how the plugin works and is displayed.

In the future, due to the number of people switching to WordPress from Blogger and similar services, or who are starting a blog for the first time, the time expense may be too great for certain plugin developers to continue working on the plugins. This has been a growing trend, with multiple versions of the same plugin being created, but by different people, as well as transferring ownership of the rights to develop certain plugins.

Should WordPress begin hosting a more advanced, non-free plugin area to the site, they may find that people still want to use the free versions. Or, it could be the other way around. If anything happens, it might be independent developers who launch their own “stores” and collect revenue on the services that they provide around the plugins, in addition to a much smaller fee (say at increments of $1, $5, or $10) to use the plugins.

The freemium model surely does exist. Even Automattic has been known to use it. For people who make “more than $500 a month” form their blog, they are recommended to purchase an Akismet Commmercial Pro-Blogger API Key. Much of this goes into continued support for the plugins, including hosting costs and ensuring that a majority of spam is caught.

On the other hand, when you introduce more features into a plugin, you are siding with more professional bloggers who contact you about adding them into the plugin. They are features that the average user wouldn’t normally take advantage of, but because they have now been included, they may look at more in-depth.

Plugin authors could request that you sign up for an affiliated service, like hosting, before they decide to give you support. Now, this works to a degree, but will want to go this route, especially if they already have settled on a hosting account. At WordPress.org, they keep hosting offers on the side, but still within reach for people who may be interested in “supporting” the service. They likely make enough to support the hosting costs of serving plugins and themes, but not much more.

Similar to the affiliate offer, ad-supported models only work to some extent – most people do not click on ads unless they are really relevant, and how relevant can they be when they are integrated into the back-end of a website, where most people aren’t looking for special promotions and products.

In Conclusion

The premium plugins marketplace could one day happen, but some work still has to be done on making the experience buying premium themes better, with one place to find (non-affiliated) themes that are fully compatible with WordPress and conform to the ethics of WordPress.

Only time will tell what happens. I am, by no means, suggesting any clear way to approach this, as I don’t have the answers, nor am I actively involved in developing plugins. It would be nice to see a plan or marketplace come to fruition, combining the expertise and support of some of the top developers.