WordPress Stats are Now Paid, What next?
I opened my site yesterday, and saw a big tick in visitors, according to WordPress Jetpack stats.
Being curious what post blog post brought so many visitors … I went to the stats page and was welcomed with this:
What i believe really happened, is that WordPress turned off the the freemium stats from my site, then inflated the stats to make me want to signup for their paid version. Signing up is not cheap, it’s approximately 10$/month for 10k views, if bots are counted (which they usually are), that probably mean you will pay 10$/month for 3-5k real views.
WordPress is an open source software that was developed with the help of volunteer developers worldwide, so they are limited monetising wise, they do offer premium and do upsell services, as well as hosting and domain management via wordpress.com, but maybe these revenues are not enough, which pushed WordPress to force payment for basic features like their basic stats.
The criteria Wordpess use to label a site as a commercial site it very wide, so that they can grab as much potential clients as possible. If you have ads, sell a service, accept donation, promote your business or even accepts sponsorships, that would classify you as a commercial site, and require you to pay to get the stats back.
Even education sites can not escape this classification.
Professionals already use more professional stats, but most wordpress users rely on the basic stats offered by wordpress free of charge, because it’s more convenient, and already integrated. Now, you no longer have the choice, pay or add another analytics and stats tracking system.
Alternatives:
Google Analytics.
What next for bloggers and WordPress ?
The integrated stats do motivate a lot of small bloggers to keep blogging, and usually blogs grow to this persistence. Without stats, you have no idea how people are visiting your blog, and might get discouraged and decide to quit blogging.
WordPress brand will also get a hit. But i do believe for few more jumps through the hoops, you would be able to get a 3rd party stats plugin that would offer similar features to the one offered by WordPress.
So what next for wordpress? No that they decided “it is ok to go after free features” where will they stop? Will they start charging us a monthly fee for using free templates and plugins, will they make it a pay only marketplace ? Who knows … But these are the signs of companies and organisations that stop innovating and start milking the end consumer for the most money they can get. That’s in my opinion, just bad business.
