David Coveney has announced on the Spectacu.la blog that the Spectacu.la theme club is closing.
Spectacu.la has made all of their themes freely available while charging for support of those themes. As a result, the club has made little money for parent company Interconnect IT. Coveney attributes this failure to not knowing “how to make the best of the GPL” and not understanding consumers’ incentives or attitudes toward risk:
“I’ve learned this: if somebody can get something for free, they will. And no matter how well intentioned, they will not join later if everything works perfectly. That’s a problem, because if you make themes that need very little support (we did) then there’s no money in charging for support unless you restrict supply of those themes. In essence you’ve anchored the price of your commodity at £0. And if you give even a hint of free support in the comments then you’ve anchored the price of your support at £0 as well. We did both. The consequence? Even paying £5 for what might amount to hours of work appears to be too expensive.”
The Spectacu.la site will be taken down in the next few weeks. Existing club members will receive an email address to which they can send support requests for the next six months. All Spectacu.la themes and plugins will continue to be available on WordPress.org.
New themes and plugins will be released under Interconnect IT.
Post Revisions:
- 27 September, 2010 @ 12:38 [Current Revision] by J. D. Bentley
- 27 September, 2010 @ 12:37 by Ryan Imel
- 27 September, 2010 @ 11:20 by Ryan Imel
Ugh. It’s frustrating to see them quit. They went in the right direction with free themes. But frankly, they lacked the qualities necessary for growing the user base. And, you can’t expect one alternate business model to take the place of actually charging for the product.
I think if you’re going to take the free themes route, you need multiple revenue streams, not just charging for support. And, you need to quickly become ubiquitous within the WordPress community. Otherwise, it’ll just take a lot out of you. After a year or two of working endlessly for little pay, where will you find the motivation?