The Enormous Reach of Penske Media’s WordPress Sites

This week a small story led me to discover a big story about WordPress’ dominance in online publishing.

The small story was about the launch of “Flow”, a new brand that’s part of She Media. First, I went to the main SHE Media website, where you’ll find sub-brands such as SheKnows, BlogHer, and STYLECASTER. All of these are WordPress sites.

Next, I went to PMC.com where you’ll find Penske Media, who are the owners of She Media … and much more. Click the “Brands” link on the PMC website and you’ll find dozens of famous entertainment sites.

Almost all of these sites are standardized on WordPress too, from Billboard and Rolling Stone to the American Music Awards and Dick Clark Productions.

Most of these sites are on WordPress VIP. The VIP team published a brief case-study written together with the PMC team. The PMC team appears entirely committed to WordPress and have built ad platforms, shared libraries, and internal processes around the platform.

You can identify PMC sites because they have a folder called /pmc-plugins/ which contains some of their shared codebase. Some of this work is on PMC’s Github account.

The XWP agency has a detailed breakdown on their work for PMC sites, with specific details on how these sites were moved to WordPress.


PMC and WordPress Summary

It’s definitely not unusual for large media organizations to be standardized on WordPress across their platforms. I’ve written before about Meredith (People, Entertainment Weekly, Martha Stewart) and Schneps (almost all local newspapers in New York).

However, until spending a little time digging into this, I didn’t realize that Penske Media could be the biggest of all these media companies that have standardized on WordPress.

WordPress has a dominance in online publishing and this will probably only grow with recent trouble for other platforms such as ArcXP from the Washington Post and Chorus from Vox Media.

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