OPINION

The creeping commercialisation of Wordpress

The famous blogging platform is still free — but increasingly less so. Is this indicative of where the web is going?

When people discuss the internet, and especially the web, you’ll often hear terms like ‘freedom’, ‘democratisation’, ‘free speech’ and ‘openness’. Others see the web in terms of ‘markets’ or ‘revenue streams’. And concepts such as ‘opportunity’ come somewhere in between.

We perhaps assume that the internet will always be a conduit for all forms of activity — personal, political, social, academic and commercial. But I can’t shake the feeling that it is heading inexorably towards being weighted in favour of the last item in that list. In other words, it’s becoming about the money.

Personal story

As an illustration, let me give you a personal story. It’s nothing significant and it’s really just my opinion. But I feel it is indicative of a trend.

I run a number of blogs based on Wordpress and have done for years. The software has become a tad bloated of late, and is annoyingly opinionated about how you should do certain things. But it’s the CMS I know and I have a lot of time invested in it.