Have you made a donation to your Wordpress Plugin Developer?

I was put to shame today, well and truly, and be prepared as you may be next.

I read a post regarding the donations that Wordpress plugin developers have received from all the hundreds of thousands of people who have decided to downloaded a plugin and install it on their blog. You might think that they have made some pretty tidy amounts from all these donations but nothing could be further from the truth.

Wordpress Plugins and a lack of financial support

The original article was posted by Kevin Eklund on his blog http://www.tomuse.com.  I would suggest you have a read at it. The numbers and generosity of people is, quite simply, frightening. Not frightening in regards the massive amounts of appreciative donations handed out by us, but the complete opposite, the severe lack of them is more to the point.

Kevin went into detail, speaking to Wordpress plugin developers such as Joost de Valk, and Donncha O Caoimh, directly and asking them the percentage of donations they received from users. It seems that upon looking at these figures it was largely under 1% and when the numbers where crunched the figure become more like 0.025% (!!) and this was for one of the most popular wp plugins available, the NextGen Gallery plugin.

I cannot dare to imagine what a less popular plugin would receive in donations but suffice to say it probably wouldn’t buy you (or them) a coffee.

Hardly a just reward for some excellent work the vast majority of us seem to have taken for granted.

Why do we have to pay?

Why should we have to pay for these plugins when Wordpress is free? The point is that wordpress may be free but the power of wordpress itself is the plugins the developers create and the support and time they give to help us use and deploy these plugins as we wish.

Without them seeing reward, and I don’t mean Kudos here, the support they give is nearly a full time job for some of these guys, but some sort of financial incentive then we may soon see these valuable wp plugins becoming much more expensive to obtain in the very near future and not through the choice of the developers but because of our lack of contribution financially.

Time to put it right – Make that donation

If your using Wordpress plugins, take a minute to think about how much value they add to your blog. Look at your plugins and ask yourself honestly “What is this plugin worth to me?”.

Login and check the settings. You may come across a polite message asking you to take the time and make a small donation to help with the development, maintenance and support of this and future wordpress plugins.  Dont hesitate, every single euro, dollar or pound will make a difference, and if we make these guys rich, well, dammit they deserve it, wouldn’t you agree?

And if they get rich, you think they will stop making great plugins?  I dont! By all of us getting together and pushing a donation their way it only serves as an incentive and gives them the ability to focus on developing more wordpress plugins for US making the whole range of plugins grow and serving to add more value to our own blogs, all for a small sign of appreciation.

Make a donation now before the Wordpress Plugin Developers are forced to pull the plug – permanently!

I have, have you?