I was doing some writing for Siobhan recently, and one of the topics I was covering was WordPress theme shops, and the economy that’s built up around them.
As a former Economics student, I got thinking about how the Premium Theme marketplace has built up from those early days of Revolution Themes over the last couple of years; how the market is structured and what that market structure means for consumers.
That thought process has lead me to this post, where I’m going to run you through the current state of the marketplace, what impact that has and what that means for consumers.
Before we start, a little bit of Economics background: we’ll be looking at things like barriers to entry, which are just any elements of the market which make entry by new businesses difficult, economies of scale which are benefits enjoyed by larger businesses and the aforementioned market structures which is, well, how the market is structured.
I think the main factor here is consumer.
Well, maybe we don’t have a standard for WordPress themes. Some themes are attractive for this type of bloggers while the others are not. We shouldn’t educate them. They know about their businesses and which style will be good for them. All we can help them is show which theme is good and bad (by codes, structure and other factors).
One of the key factors that needs to be taken into consideration in regards to good themes vs bad themes is the consumer. There is a HUGE difference between the theme buyer who runs a technology centered business and the soccer mom who just wants a pretty blog to talk about cookies and changing diapers… and to be sure that is a significant part of the WordPress theme market for free and premium themes alike. Educating all premium theme customers on what a good theme is would be a futile effort but I agree it needs to be looked at so here we have quite the conundrum…don’t we?
Very compelling post Alex, you show wisdom beyond your years… keep up the good work.
[…] 26. WP Shout and WordPress Economics […]
This principle is one of my primary motivators for involvement in the Theme Review Team, and by extension, for speaking at WordCamps: to help educate both developers and end users regarding what truly constitutes Theme quality.
Your “search engines” tick mark is a perfect example: what makes a Theme “good” is not that it is “search engine optimized” or that it integrates every SEO bell and whistle du jour; rather, what makes a Theme “good” is that it is designed with clean, semantic markup, and that it gets out of the way of (or even facilitates) the integration of SEO Plugins that add those bells and whistles.
There is a paradigm shift that needs to take place with respect to what constitutes Theme quality. That paradigm shift is now almost three years in the making with the official Theme directory, and I’m starting to see inroads in the commercial Theme shops, as well. That’s exciting, because in the end, the real winners are the end users.
Chip,
I wish I was as optimistic as you are regarding the paradigm shift. Not in official Theme directory, of course, but outside of it, where there’s no one to regulate things and enforce something similar to Theme Review Guidelines.
There’s a good reason why McDonalds will always beat a place that serves nice food in sales volumes, for same price people seem to prefer lots of junk to regular quantities of good stuff.
The way I see it, there’s two ways to normalize user expectations when it comes to what a Theme is and what it isn’t:
1. A marketplace that sells themes for less money than ThemeForest does, but they would have to be Themes and nothing but. No plugin teritorry code involved.
2. A marketplace that sells themes like I just described, but for a premium price. For that to make sense theme review would have to be flawless and marketplace would have to guarantee each single line of code is great. So, probably something like WordPress.com commercial themes, but for self-hosted websites.
[…] Current State of the WordPress Theme Marketplace […]
I’d argue that this is something ThemeForest (generally) already trying to tackle through its’ ratings system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really help users find what would be considered “good” themes, rather, it helps users find themes other users consider “good”. So in essence, they are perpetuating the problem.