WordPress requires web hosting
…of some sort - so you can either

Buy some hosting from someone else,
Get some hosting from someone else for free (various alternative exist here… mostly involving someone else’s ads)
Or you can do it …

I must say that if there’s one thing that makes Matt stand out amongst all other blogstars, it’s his constant professionalism and humility. For that I say respect!

The comments from SP and Matt clarify many of the misreadings and wily extrapolations in my post. While I tried to cover all angles of the marketplace affair, there were clearly huge gaps in my information. Apologies to you guys for all the gaping voids.

Whilst I’ll always remain skeptical towards people in any position of power (that’s what happens to you when you grow up in France!) I think both Matt and SP deserve recognition for their time and energy spent promoting what has become the world’s premier blogging platform.

SP, the notion of ‘Community consensus’ sounds reasonable to me, how you’re able to implement ‘democracy’ within a Wordpress theme and also within a marketplace will be of interest to many. I for one will be watching closely.

Thanks again for stopping by and for leaving your comments. I appreciate it.

Here’s what you said:

“On top of that, consider that WordPress.com is adding 150,000 blogs a month and there is no additional marginal cost for you to reach that audience, every one with one-click integration so simpler someone who couldn’t spell FTP could buy your theme.”

I know SP has his moments, but for the most part, he’s a really benefit to the WP community. He offers a lot more value than the majority of bloggers (although, with a sting in the tail).

Actually I didn’t mean that at all. I think some folks have a bias against WordPress.com users and interpreted my comment in that light. WP.com users are NOT cheap, or dumb, or too lazy to run their own WP.

Quite the opposite, WordPress.com users are quite sophisticated — they’re journalists, small businesses, enthusiasts, families… I actually think they’re a better audience to sell to than .org users, just like Apple users are more accustomed to buying software, WP.com users are more accustomed to value-added paid upgrades and there’s a completely integrated shopping experience with their details saved if they bought something before. (Which many, many have.)

There’s people in the world who have more time than money, and there’s those who have more money than time, and I think WP.com biases toward the latter because of its ease of setup and maintenance.

I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur because I don’t really like taking risks. Although, I do have a financial goal.

I’m not a web designer, only an amateur. It says so on my blog

My comment about “selling to uninformed users” was not a baseless assumption. Matt Mullenweg actually stopped by Wpdesigner to confirm that.

Second, you caught me. Your observation is spot on. But on the other hand, you can’t really expect me to tackle this marketplace without some form of compensation.

We already know why I’m doing this through reasons you listed above, but let me add to those list of reasons.

While forming the alternate marketplace idea, I asked myself what I needed to make this thing worthwhile without having to charge the theme designers a ridiculous amount of money.

It turned out that what I need comes down to time, traffic, content, and a way to tie everything about Wpdesigner together, which includes its upcoming web hosting service.

I was struggling with the idea of charging a flat fee at first and ended up settling with the 2-4 blog posts “exploit” for two reasons:

- I hate fees. I sold premium themes before and I hated transaction fees.

- The main reason is I don’t want my blog to die. With my time divided among so many projects and now another one, I need the theme designers to kind of take care of themselves while using Wpdesigner.com as their platform.

As for your question about quality inspection, nothing has been drawn out for this. For all I know, the quality inspection will be based everyone’s general opinion of what qualifies a theme for the high quality title.

If you’ve read the whole article, I briefly mentioned the “community consensus” idea, which can be used to filter out bad or poorly developed themes. It can also be used to stop me from playing favorites.

When everything has to go through one person, there bound to be some form of disagreement further down the road. Right now, I’m leaning toward the “community consensus” idea, but don’t really know how to approach it yet.