Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic — the company behind the content management platform WordPress — plans expansion for 2016 and says that part of that growth will come from social media generating traffic to WordPress sites, increasing their visibility.
While some have said that social media sites are replacing other webpages as “destination sites,” Mullenweg disagrees. He believes that social media is driving traffic to webpages that have valuable content. That means that social media is driving users towards WordPress, which now hosts more than 25 percent of sites on the Internet.
“What these networks tend to do is drive visitors to good content,” Mullenweg said of social media in an interview with the Irish Times. “If you’re a publisher and you have good work, I think there will always be an audience there. I think social networks provide distribution for that.”
People are logging into Facebook and Twitter with increasing frequency, but what’s important to remember is that those sites produce little to no content on their own. Instead, social media relies on users to submit content and then provide an avenue for that content to be aggregated, recognized, and promoted. Mullenweg says that WordPress will be continue to be relevant in the age of social media because it hosts many of the sites towards which social media directs traffic. Social media will only increase the importance of WordPress in the coming years, not phase it out.
Currently, 57 percent of websites don’t use a content management system and this is where Mullenweg sees the future of his company.
He has plans to move even more of the internet onto the WordPress system by making the platform easier to use for developers and non-developers alike. He is investing in plugins for WordPress, like WooCommerce and JetPack that increase the range of functions for sites built on the WordPress platform, and updating the API to be more flexible across platforms and different programming languages.
Mullenweg’s company is now valued at $1.16 billion dollars, making it a rare tech unicorn.
Automattic has 400 employees but is also actively hiring — a process that Mullenweg oversees personally. The parent company of WordPress will leverage social media’s connection to its sites along with other updates to the CMS as it looks to increase its stake in the content management world.
