How can a company like Automattic make money if they are giving away all their products (including WordPress) for free? Someone asked this question to WordPress founder Matt at WordCamp India and he surprised, at least some of us, by saying that Automattic is profitable.
Here’s how WordPress makes money according to the creator himself:
1. Blog Hosting – WordPress offers blog hosting services at $500 per month to big publishers like Om Malik, All Things D and CNN’s Political Ticker among others. They use WordPress.com’s server infrastructure to host your blog and therefore the performance will obviously be great but unlike other web hosting services, WordPress VIP Hosting doesn’t accept everyone who applies so good luck.
2. Google AdSense - Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google ads but these ads may only appear if all the following three conditions are met:
- The visitor is not using Firefox browser.
- He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one.
- The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So a person reaching abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com won’t see any Google Ads.
Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as do around a billion page views per month.
3. Automattic Kismet – You don’t see Viagra spam in your blog posts because it all gets filtered automatically by Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), the excellent spam protection plug-in available for WordPress.
Now Akismet spam catching technology is free for personal blogs but if you maintain a corporate blog or run a network of blogs, you are required to buy a commercial license of Akismet that starts at around $50 per month.
What may surprise you is that professional bloggers, or anyone who is making more than $500 per month in advertising revenue from a WordPress blog, also needs to pay a $5 per month fee for the Akismet license.
4. Premium Accounts – While anyone can host a blog on WordPress.com for free, they charge you a fee if you want to buy additional storage space for your multimedia files or want to use a custom web domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. These arepremium features.
There’s also (unconfirmed) talk that WordPress may soon allow users to add AdSense in their free blogs for a subscription fee.
5. Web Host Referrals – WordPress.org suggests of list of third-party web hosting companies where you may self-host your WordPress blog(s) for a fee. Now all these are referral links so Automattic gets a commission per sale.
In fact, this hosting referral system may be extremely profitable for Automattic because if you search for “WordPress Hosting” on Google (a very competitive keyword phrase), the first sponsored link on the Google results page is paid by WordPress itself and it says – “Top 5 WordPress Web Hosts – Chosen by the developers of the WordPress blogging software”.
6. WordPress Support – If you need help with WordPress (or WordPress MU) but the free support forums aren’t solving the purpose, consider subscribing to the Support Network of Automattic. The WordPress development team will help you solve problems related to your WordPress system and the response time can be as low as 6 hours. This service is primarily for Enterprise users who are willing to shell out a $2.5-5k per year for support.
7. Poll Daddy – I am not sure if Matt discussed this but Automattic also provides a paid version of Poll Daddy where you can have unlimited number of questions per survey and there’s no Poll Daddy branding in your polls or surveys.
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Broken Links Remover is a pluging for wordpress to help you to monitor all the link in the blog post and will removes(hides) the broken links from the reader (either is human visitor or a bot). 
If you are serious in your blog world using WordPress, then here are some of the plugin that you must have in order to help you to manage your blog better, optimize it for search engine, and also have a better interaction with you reader.
With WP Page Number, you are not only displaying the next and previous button but also displaying the total page number, current page number to your reader. This actually make your reader clear that where are their location now. 
I like to put the images in most of my blog post because I believe that with photo, it can make the post look more interesting so that can help to reader to increase the ability to understand the content better.
The intra site link is one of the important criteria that may help you to increase your search result ranking. You may link your keyword by your self manually to achive that purpose, but it may be very troublesome for you if you have a lot of post that inter related to each other.
After you had install a lot of plugin in your wordpress, it create another problem for you to keep your plugin up to date. Plugin central is a plugin that help you to monitor the updated plugin and alert you whenever there is a newer version.
One of the way for your reader to contact you personally is via the Contact form. This can make bring you as the owner of the blog and your reader become more closer. 
