The MT Plugin Life Follow-Up
About a month ago I made a post disclosing the figures behind my commercial plugin downloads and licenses. With paid licenses falling well short of the effort I put into them, I wondered aloud if there is a commercial plugin market for MT and if so, what needs to change.
I've been tied up with helping others patch their MT installs, client work and, oddly enough, plugin development. It's high time I recap some of the feedback my post generated and present some of my opinions based on it. (There once was a time were I was quite good at mailing list summary posts.)
First I should mention that I am grateful for all of the insightful responses and discussion posted in the comments here and on the ProNet mailing list. I have listened and have spent a fair bit of time these past weeks starting to implement the suggestions. I held back another beta of Feeds.App 3.0 until recently while I rewrote the marketing copy and furthered the documentation. I've also held releasing Tags.App 2.0 until I can do the same. I still have a lot more to work on, but it's a start that I hope many will find helpful.
Generally, It would seem that those who commented feel there is not much of a market for commercial plugins though the reasons and outlook varied as did suggestions for improving the market.
Dan Wolfgang wrote:
Unfortunately, my opinion is that no, commercial plugins are not viable, for a combination of all the reasons you cited and more.
Here's the "and more" part: based on my point of view and what I've learned talking to others, if your plugin adds a really good feature it's going to be a failure. In the long term, if your plugin is a good idea that many can use, it's going to become part of the MT core. That can quickly turn into a game where you try to guess how long your plugin will be useful and what the shorter-term income it generates will total--is it worth the effort? Tags.App sounds like a good example of this.
He went on the share his experience as a plugin developer as did a number of others with similar outlooks.
One interesting response to my question of a viable commercial plugin market came from Kevin Shay:
My short answer is: "Maybe, in Japan."
He noted that his RightFields plugin only began to catch on because of a post made by Six Apart Japan tech guru Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. This is despite the interface and documentation never having been translated into Japanese.
The idea of the Japan market having great potential had occurred to me. Look at this Google Trends chart (source) comparing the search interest of WordPress (blue) and Movable Type (red) searches.
It shows WordPress being ahead of MT in all areas except one. Unlike all other languages, MT blows away WP in Japanese language searches. Also note that MT's Japanese language bar is the biggest by far of any on the whole chart. When I saw a similar chart recently this trend really got my attention. I assume that because of the language barrier that this success is "lost in translation."
Arvind Satyanarayan offers the only really positive outlook for the commercial plugin market sharing the figures of his 14 plugins.
Arvind wins the award for best idea. He requires an email address in order to download the plugin and later uses that email address to follow-up with that user. He admits to being a bit nervous to how this would be received, but found that reaction was positive overall. He said the personal touch has helped him solicit feedback and increased payments.
This is definitely something I intended to implement on my own site. I don't believe hiding the documentation and disclosing it via email is the way to go though. Its clear from the comments following my post that documentation is too important in making the sale. I intend on using TypeKey since it requires an account and valid email address to use the service.
While Arvind feels that he is successful, Dan Wolfgang notes:
...I think Arvind's work also backs up the idea that it's not a money-maker. A quick comparison: nearly $585 from 14 plugins is notably worse than Tim's $193.71 for 1 plugin.
Agreed. Not comparing life situations, Arvind is averaging less then $42 a plugin. This does not come close to most developers definition of viable. It would be interesting to know if one of Arvind's plugins or perhaps even a few gross more then others. These numbers also don't take into consideration differences in pricing scheme. (Pricing is a topic which was not discussed that does need to be addressed.)
Issues of viability aside many suggestion to improving the market where floated.
The first theme to emerge was the need for better information on what a plugin does and how it works. Put another way, plugins like mine need to do a better job of selling.
Bruce Prochnau posted a good summary:
I know that plugin sales improve with:
1: Good documentation.
2: Examples of code that drop in and work.
3: Support
4: A live demo is perfect. Sites using it also great.
Setting the issue of support aside for a later post, I must agree that my plugins are a bit of a mess in this regard and certainly need to improve.
I'm a coder first and foremost, so selling and marketing don't come naturally even though I come from a family of sales, marketing and small-time entrepreneurs. Task switching from debugging some deep seated bug to then writing good marketing copy is a pain in the back side. One of my frustrations is that this requires even more time, especially since there is no framework put in place for these things. I've been forced to make this stuff up as I go and learn through trial-and-error which burns a lot of cycles. I don't mind putting in the work; however, the revenue stream is such that I can't afford the amount of time I'm being forced to burn.
Dan Wolfgang said:
Good documentation requires a lot of work, including many rounds of writing, rewriting, editing, re-editing, and following the steps.
Having written my fair share of documentation, including the MT 3.2 manual, I completely agree. Good documentation looks deceptively easy, but takes a lot of time and effort.
That's still no excuse though. Better docs is a point well taken that I intend to do something about. It will take time and effort, but I intend on arriving.
Another theme that came up more then any other was the issue of promotion.
Developer Chad Everett wrote I have no doubt that just knowing that the plugin is there is likely what keeps the numbers low. He noted the community forums being up and down or well-populated and plugin directory not being used or maintained as contributing to this issue.
For instance, Dan Wolfgang noted that at the time of his message the top most link in the Plugin Directory at the time to the plugin's page was broken. The orange ENCLOSURES 1.4 link mangles the URI and the user never gets to the authors page.
Mark Carey offered two good suggestions for spreading the word about plugins. He offered that MT commercial licenses could ship with plugins Six Apart thinks are useful in addition to linking to the plugins directory. He also suggested a newsbox feed in MT admin UI that displays a feed of plugins.
Both are good ideas. I'd personally take a different spin on the newsbox and would like to see ways of communicating with users after they've installed a plugin. This could simply be a link to a syndication feed and a way of communicating a new version of a plugin is available.
Six Apart staffer and plugin developer Bryne Reese offered his opinions. He noted that Movable Type is being marketed to a business and enterprise market and is no longer a personal tool. Under the heading "Know your market, know your customer" had this to say:
On the flip side, MT Enterprise can have a price tag of $10k-$50k. Under these circumstances, paying a little extra (say $99) is NOTHING to the customer. Why? Because the budget is already exists with the buyer, and the enterprise customer actually wants to pay you because an enterprise can never afford to not pay you for a legitimate license. So you have willingness to pay, and you have money on the table - what more could you ask for?
Coming from someone who works for Six Apart I found this statement worrisome because it shows a general lack of understanding to how enterprise software sales work.
In response to Byrne's statement, Michael Boyle asked "Does MT certify (and sell) 3rd-party plugins for the Enterprise?" He continues:
I don't know that it's reasonable to even casually discuss Enterprise sales and plugins if not. Six Apart is likely the smallest vendor many Enterprise clients will ever deal with - so expecting plugin vendors to be able to sell to them is quite unrealistic. The enterprise customer may WANT to pay, but also may not realistically be ABLE to pay, at least not easily.
Even if they can pay (which honestly if it happens will usually mean a manager buys the plugin license on his personal credit card and expenses it to get around the purchasing process) that's not the only hurdle. Without certification, I doubt many compliance managers and such would ever allow a plugin in an MT-E install anyhow.
Does Six Apart have definite, published plans about all of this side of things?
Given my 15 years of enterprise IT experience I have to agree with what Michael says. Some type endorsement system along with co-sales and co-marketing is essential to any type of commercial plugin viability right now. Unfortunately no response was offered by Six Apart to Michael's question.
How are small third party developers to know what enterprise customer problems are? It's unlikely an enterprise customer is going to blog about it or make a post to the ProNet mailing list. I have access to a few corporate clients, but I would assume Six Apart has a lot more access and insight than all plugin developers combined. Six Apart has nothing in place to disseminate this information though.
Shortly after my post Six Apart devoted their bi-weekly ProNet conference call to the topic of my post. Unfortunately technical difficulties kept me from joining the call, no matter how hard I tried. (The call was powered by freeconferencecall.com and, well.... you get what you pay for.)
I know some discussion involved the idea of plugin certification. It seems that this notion is being overblown for what is needed. I'll reserve the rest of my commentary for another post. This one is already too long.
Like I said I never made it on the call to make much of a report here. Perhaps someone who did can post something in the comments here?
Where does this leave the viability of a commercial plugin market?
It's still unclear really, but I think that this conversation so far has given it a bit more clarity.
Wayne Bremser perfectly sums up why a viable plugin market needs to emerge when he wrote to the ProNet list "the fact that [plugins] exist makes MT a compelling product to build sites with. Every new project has unique needs and the library of plugins is the thing that gives me the confidence to recommend the MT platform to a client."
I believe there could be a viable market for commercial third-party plugins; however, the jury is still out. Based on the feedback my post garnered I'd say whether or not one forms around MT is mostly up to Six Apart. It will depend on their success in selling MT to the enterprise space and, just as importantly, whether they actively promote and nurture the third party plugin space in a meaningful way. Without Six Apart's direct involvement and considerable support I see little changing.
This said, plugin developers need to do a better job selling/marketing their commercial plugins. It requires time and effort, but without it they have little chance of amounting to anything.
Enough for now. What do you think?
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