The Wrong Way To Make Money

Before I get into this, I will first say that I truly “love” WordPress”. I know that might sound a little over the top, but there is simply no other blogging software that even comes close to WordPress.

Over the past few days there has been some discoveries that were made about the way that WordPress decided to make money. Being one of the most popular sites, with a very high page rank, they are very attractive to advertisers. The problem was first brought to light in this topic at the WordPress site, which was quickly “closed” to new replies. The rest of what happened can be found at Waxy.org.

Basicly, they were quietly hosting over 168,000 articles on their web site. They also created links to those articles from the WordPress home page, and hid them using CSS to give them a “negative” position (specificly, a -9000px position). Basicly, the links were off to the left side of the page, and were not visible to anybody viewing the site.

WordPress’ page rank has been totally taken away, and thus, they will no longer be listed at Google, due to the misleading practice, which is called “cloaking”.

I think that Matt Mullenweg (the big guy at WordPress) was just trying to make some money from a project that he has spent so much on. Apparently, they are getting ready to hire an employee, and this was just supposed to be a short term deal to “bootstrap something nice for the community”.

Here is the best response that I have ever read to something that “could have” turned into something very bad. Make sure that you take the time to read Matt’s response. The most important part of it, is the whole thing! The honesty of his complete response has some amazing power! How else can he make money with the WordPress project? He says that he doesn’t “need” any money from the the project, but I think the support of the community and even a small donation from it’s many users on a fairly regular basis would keep anything like this from happening again.

This is also a good time to help support “any” product or service that you use, that is free.

Comments

• Featured Links

Copyright © 2007 Feed Money • Using Dropshadow theme by Brian Gardner