WordPress has seen off another competitor. The Chorus CMS is being shut down.
Vox Media had developed Chorus for its own websites. Vox owns a ton of news and culture properties including Vox, New York Magazine, The Verge, The Cut, Eater, and Vulture.
As Chorus grew, Vox also tried to attract external publishers onto the platform. Chorus became a rival to WordPress.
However, Vox has struggled in recent years and is going to re-focus on selling advertising and subscriptions. Back in December, Vox stopped selling Chorus. Now, Axios breaks the news that Vox will retire Chorus and move their own sites to WordPress VIP.
The whole Axios article reads like a sponsored ad for WordPress. Here are some of the quotes:
- “WordPress’ continued dominance in the space has made it harder to compete.”
- “WordPress’ continued commitment to the publishing space, and specifically for news publishers, makes its products cheaper in many cases than for publishers trying to rely on their own technology.”
- “You can’t minimize the fact that they figured out a lot about customer revenue at WordPress. … And that didn’t used to be the case.”
Also in this Axios article, there’s mention of a technology partnership with WordPress VIP:
The company still owns other tech products, including Concert, its advertising platform, and Coral, the commenting platform … Concert and Coral will both soon become part of a new tool set for publishers that will be made available to WordPress VIP clients.”
Axios also included a list of other publishing platforms that have been run over by WordPress’ dominance in publishing, including Kinja and Arc XP.
Matt Mullenweg posted on his blog:
I believe that on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of proprietary software drops to zero. … Unless you invest heavily in engineering (like tens of millions per year), the steady improvement of a healthy open source community, like the tens of thousands of developers working on WordPress every day, will eventually catch and surpass any proprietary system.
