Matt Mullenweg recently announced that a new feature is about to be unveiled for WordPress.com users, a theme marketplace,here’s what it basically means:

“The idea is that designers will be able to upload themes, we put a price (Automattic takes half), and users can navigate the directory and quickly select, pay and install a template, everything from the same place and without major expertise.”
source

There have been some backlash and consfusion but overall i think it’s a pretty good idea.

Here is an excerpt from Matt’s blog about the proposed new feature:

Right now WordPress.com is a little bit like a clothing store with only XXL men’s pink ponchos available — not a lot of selection. We’d like to offer more products, hence the idea of a theme marketplace.

Imagine you’re a theme designer and if you do a custom one-off theme for a site like this you may get $500. (Keeping the numbers simple for the sake of argument.) Making a good theme is really hard, and you may only be able to do one a week. Now imagine you made a theme and uploaded it to our theme marketplace, then set a price of $50. You’re now an option on the dashboard of 1,736,206 blogs, if we split the price evenly and 20 of those 1,736,206 blogs purchase the theme, you just made as much as you would doing a one-off design. You can plug in different numbers and assumptions there and it’s pretty easy to see how this could be big for designers.

This might be a good alternative for designers that have been selling sponsored links on their themes (me included), why release a theme for free when you would have a chance to make equal the amount or more by placing your theme in the WordPress.com marketplace? And according to the stats by Matt there’s 1,736,206 blogs on WordPress.com,i’m sure the odds of someone buying your theme are pretty high, but of course the theme would have to “look” premium and not like some rehash design, it has to be unique.

Many theme developers out there get nothing for releasing their themes to the public, plus they are expected to provide support for their themes,i’m sure this will be a good option for designers out there that are really good in design.

Check out more at Matt’s blog.

I’m intersted to see what happens, definitely keeping an eye on this.

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