Premium themes are in for a rough ride
Just a quick one today, because I’m trying a new Wisdump design concept, and if it turns out OK (or promising at least), I’ll post it here and let you guys say what you think. Just like I did with the previous one.
So, premium themes are in for a rough ride. There’s a lot of money involved, and support is great for buyers needing that, of course. However, if there’s something the open source community is good at, is to offer alternatives. Blog Perfume features the BranfordMagazine theme for WordPress, a theme that’s bound to take a way some sales from newsy premium themes.
And here’s the problem for premium themes. There will always be theme designers who do similar ones, and release them for free!
The premium themes are indeed in for a rough ride.
I agree that there will always be free alternatives to premium themes. It is short sided to say that those premium themes won’t be able to succeed. If anything the internet economy has taught me, it’s that as long as your product is of quality and not overpriced then you should be able to benefit from the long tail effect. Just because Windows and OS X have free alternatives does not mean they will fail.
By Jacob Chapel on February 7, 2008 2:27 am
I didn’t say that they would fail, I said that they were in for a rough ride. Remember, this is a niche that is built upon open source, so the paying incentive is further away than in other niches. Like OS’s for instance, you can’t really compare that since people are used to pay for their OS, be it Windows or OS X, or even the original *nix distros.
By Thord Daniel Hedengren on February 7, 2008 2:49 am
BranfordMagazine theme is about 85% Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt, changes made in Bradford Magazine - 3 days by any average coder, copy/paste from 3 themes, so please link to Mimbo theme
By Ivan M. on February 7, 2008 10:17 am
That may be so, Ivan, but the actual theme wasn’t the point here. I used the BranfordMagazine theme to illustrate the fact that a lot of things that were what got people attracted to premium newsy WordPress themes in the first place, now is out there for free. Mimbo does that to.
By Thord Daniel Hedengren on February 7, 2008 10:15 pm
@Ivan: seems as if you didn´t understand the core message of this article…
By Michael Oeser on February 8, 2008 12:56 am
@Oseser :) I did understand the core message :) and this message What Mimbo Hath Spawned
“Oeser has also provided a PayPal link in case anyone wants to compensate him for the effort.”
By Ivan on February 11, 2008 8:47 am