Episode 58: Leadership and the Business of WordPress Plugins: Lessons from the Yoast Black Friday Ad

Yoast, the SEO plugin installed on 9 million WordPress sites, ran a Black Friday sale, experimenting with an ad in the WordPress admin dashboard. The internet furor was dramatic, and Yoast’s CEO Marieke van de Rakt took ownership, showing exceptional leadership. We discuss the ad and the response from both users and competitors and the challenges of running a plugin business under a freemium model. We also cover stories about AVG and Avast browser extensions, the Magento Marketplace hack, the private equity purchase of .org and a data leak affecting 1.2 billion people.

Here are approximate timestamps if you’d like to jump around:
1:10 The Yoast Black Friday Ad Controversy
9:15 Yoast’s leadership in the midst of attacks
15:00 The fremium plugin model, advertising in WordPress admin
25:17 Mozilla Removes Avast and AVG extensions
29:45 Magento Marketplace Hack
32:00 Lessons for WordPress
34:00 Private Equity purchase of .org
43:00 Leak affecting 1.2 billion people

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This week in the news we cover:

• WP Tavern’s coverage of the Yoast Black Friday ad, and discussion on Hacker News.
• Mozilla removes Avast/AVG browser extensions.
• Adobe admits breach of Magento Marketplace portal. Matt Barry’s research into similar risks with the WordPress.org systems.
• Ethos Capital is taking over .org early next year, and some are calling it the great .org heist, saying that .org was sold for half its valuation.
• Personal And Social Information Of 1.2 Billion People Discovered In Massive Data Leak.

You can find Mark on Twitter as @mmaunder and Kathy as @kathyzant.

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