Alternate Theme Business Models

[BinaryMoon]

I'm in the sell a product camp. I work full time and sell themes as a hobby but I am sure if I down the theme route full time I would be able to make a living from it - the money now isn't bad :)

I would like to do more free content though, mostly as marketing, and have recently purchased http://wpvote.com which I am rebuilding to use as an additional marketing method (and to be an awesome WordPress resource obviously :) )

[andrea_r]

I think at this point, for someone new to do well in the theme market, it has to:

- be really nice looking
- do something different
- be put out by someone who already made a name for themselves

and have recently purchased http://wpvote.com which I am rebuilding to use as an additional marketing method (and to be an awesome WordPress resource obviously

Sweet! :D

[foress]

Here's a model I probably would want to implement in Premium Mod in future: - Theme Sponsorship.

It's not the evil-old-footer-link sponsorship, but instead, the sponsors information (banners, links, sales pitch) will appear in the theme release post.

Just like how Jeff monetize the WPWeekly Podcast. Or Ryan Bates in Railscast.

The only problem I foresee is - will the sponsor buy the idea?

Another model for Premium Mod will be a listing of theme modders available for hire. Free listing and premium listing.

[developdaly]

Um, I think the people making a living on premium themes see it as a real option. :) And I don't want to get into the GPL debate either, but I will point out the big theme shops are not really in the business of selling themes. They are in the business of providing support. Huge difference. And it is definitely GPL-theme friendly. :)

What I don't see as a "real" option is just selling themes. I totally agree that the "big theme shops" are viable businesses because their main asset is support.

All I was saying was that if they didn't offer support their business would likely disappear after the themes were distributed for free by someone else.

So there needs to be a value-add if you're just selling themes outright (i.e. support).

Maybe we could make a list of the business models we've seen the WP world?

[developdaly]

Theme Club

Offer themes for free download and provide premium support via forums.

Sell individual themes that include support via forums.

Theme Sponsorship

Ads placed in the backend.

Ads on the theme's release page.

Free + Upgrades

Offer a free, basic theme and a better version that includes support.

Bait

Release free themes in the hope that they attract attention so you can do more consultant work.


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What else?

[andrea_r]

All I was saying was that if they didn't offer support their business would likely disappear after the themes were distributed for free by someone else.

Totally in agreement there, I think we're coming at it from two ends to the same conclusion. There's absolutely no point in *just* selling a theme. Because the code can & will be redistributed, GPL or not.

More theme models:

- Child themes
Put out the basic theme for free, sell child themes?

Theme customization, custom theme creation.

[Mike Smith]

Premium theme authors could also release a free version of a theme and then add a premium version with a style switcher and say, 10+ theme style options (ie: a basic black/white version and then various colors and styles on the premium version).

[developdaly]

Premium theme authors could also release a free version of a theme and then add a premium version with a style switcher and say, 10+ theme style options (ie: a basic black/white version and then various colors and styles on the premium version).

This sounds more like a theme plugin to me, which I haven't seen done in a pay model yet. This would work great for theme frameworks. In fact, I've made a plugin for Hybrid that is one of a host of plugins that Hybrid users can choose as add-ons to beef up their theme.

Over at Theme Hybrid we've been discussing the ways in which child theme authors can make money. See here and here.

The problem we're facing as child theme/plugin developers is how to work with the framework. It doesn't make sense to split the support up or for users to pay for two memberships.

[jakebarnes]

An extension of Conorp's idea, would be to have everything free for the first few weeks, then have advertising appear on the users site. This way they could keep using the theme if they wanted, but they'd have to deal with your advertisements appearing on their site.

You could push this idea to something of an extreme. You, as the seller of a theme, could store essential PHP code in a file on your own server. The theme that your customers use would then have to use something like fopen() or file_get_contents() to fetch the code from your site. I suppose the code would use something like eval() to activate the imported code. Then your customers would be paying for access to the essential code on your site.

Your customers could hack your code, but it would take a little effort on their part - they'd need to dive into your code to see where it fetches the crucial data from you site, then run that part of the code themselves, see what code is being fetched from your site, and then copy and paste that to their own server.

If you wanted to take this to a truly ridiculous level, the code in your theme could depend on a checksum that, perhaps, checks against the current date, and also against some key pulled from your servers. Or you could even check against the md5() hash of a checksum. Again, your customers could hack your code, but at this point it would take them some effort to do so (some effort = 15 minutes).

Of course, all of the above is a bad idea, for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that if your server ever went out, then all of your customers would be offline, even if their servers were working just fine. And you'd end up with a lot of pissed off customers, which is probably not a good thing.

On a related subject, I just read a post about the problem of funding open source software development, and it made me think of what kind of changes need to happen for open source software to remain viable - my thoughts focused on the kind of fund-rasing that non-profits do, or that NPR radio does.

http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2009/...urce-software/

[Ryan]

YThe theme that your customers use would then have to use something like fopen() or file_get_contents() to fetch the code from your site. I suppose the code would use something like eval() to activate the imported code.

I actually have a similar concept in mind already, although definitely not for the reasons you are suggesting above and I certainly wouldn't do it with PHP and I'd cache the data in the users own WordPress installation for performance reasons.

There's an HTTP API built into WordPress BTW, so best use that instead of raw PHP functions.