Wordpress.com gets influx of VC money, launches video publishing tool

Filed under: Business, Podcasting, Blogging, Open Source

Wordpress.com gets influx of VC money, launches video publishing tool

by Jason Harris Jan 23rd 2008

The company behind the popular WordPress blogging platform and WordPress.com, Automattic, has received a large influx of cash from investors. The company has drawn $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including the New York Times Company. After last weeks' news of MySQL being acquired by Sun Microsystems, it appears if you have a great idea and a good business structure, open source is a viable business model.

Matt Mullenweg, the man behind Automattic, has said the company will use the money to build infrastructure, expand product offerings such as Gravatar and spam protection service Akismet, and offer new hosted solutions.

Looking at some of the new traffic metrics, WordPress.com will need to strengthen it's infrastructure. According to GigaOm, In the last 30 days Quantcast reports that Wordpress.com attracted 42 million unique U.S. page views, 114 million global uniques, and 492 million page views overall. WordPress.com is a very attractive option for individuals and organizations who want a blog but don't want to stress about the necessary infrastructure required.

WordPress.com is host to some high profile blogs including Robert Scoble, the GigaOM network, CNN, Fox, and Fortune Magazine.

In other WordPress.com news, Automattic has just launched a fantastic option for their premier customers. Pro users of their services will be able to store up to 8GB of media that can be combined with a beta video player to enable bloggers to publish video and/or audio. One drawback is the uploads are limited to 70MB, which means an individual video would be limited to about 15 minutes. Not bad for $20/year.

Additionally, at this time WordPress doesn't create an iTunes compatible RSS feeds. However, this functionality can be done by utilizing FeedBurner or a like service.

This new video/audio publishing tool may work for some podcasters who today rely on a service such as YouTube or Blip.tv. Having all your media on your WordPress weblog would be very beneficial.

[via GigaOm]

Tags: blogging, wordpress

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

enzo said 10:13PM on 1-23-2008

maybe they can use some of that VC money to make customizing CSS templates free...

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