The Marketing of Drupal

In his keynote address at DrupalCon 2011 in London, Dries Buytaert made the case that WordPress is not a Drupal competitor. It's a point he first made on his blog in April of that year writing, "While there are things we can learn from WordPress, it is not the competition."

Instead, Buytaert has implored the Drupal community to focus on two other areas. First, he has promoted outreach to the large percentage of websites that currently do not use a content management system at all. Secondly, he has encouraged the Drupal community to learn about the commercial CMS alternatives and help large companies using those systems move to Drupal.

Buytaert makes some valid points, but is he right that WordPress is not a competitor to Drupal? I don't think so.

Where Things Stand

Before we discuss WordPress as a competitor, let's pause to take a look at the overall market for content management systems. The chart below shows the market share for the top CMS platforms.

You'll notice that WordPress is well in the lead with 54.1%. Joomla is in second place with 9.5% and Drupal is third with 6.6% market share. The 'Other' category represents dozens of other systems and makes up 22.4% of the market.

Notably, this 22.4% includes a number of competitors that Buytaert has singled out for attention including Open Text ( .03% market share) and SiteCore (less than .01% market share). We'll discuss why these systems have Buytaert's attention in a moment.

Although looking at market share at any given point in time is interesting, it's often more useful to look at trends.  Take a look at this table of market share trends over the last year. 

Clearly this table is worrying if you make your living with vBulletin or Joomla. WordPress has seen a slight uptick in market share as has Drupal. Now keep in mind that this is market share, not total usage. An amazing 70.9% of sites monitored do not use a content management system at all. 

Given this, it makes sense that Buytaert would encourage the Drupal community to focus on this group of websites. But is it true to say that Drupal isn't competing with WordPress in this space? 

Understanding the Problem

A really useful analogy for what is happening in the CMS market is the tablet market. You may have seen the recent report that tablet and e-reader ownership in the US has risen to 29%. That means over 70% of Americans don't own one of these devices, about the same percentage as websites who aren't using a CMS.

I'm sure most people would agree there are going to be plenty of both iPads and Kindle Fires sold in the next couple of years. But I wonder how many of you would say iPads are not competing with Kindle Fires for buyers?

It's true that the Kindle Fire and the iPad are targeting different segments of the tablet market. The iPad is the premium product with more features, better performance and a higher cost. Kindle has a lower price, fewer features and not as good performance.

However, there are large number of buyers who are cost conscious and perhaps leaning toward purchasing the Fire, but who might pay for the iPad if they are convinced of the added value they will recieve for the extra cost.

In my view Drupal and WordPress are a lot like the iPad and Fire. They appeal to somewhat different market segments, but there is a large group of potential customers in the middle who are trying to decide which CMS best suits their needs.

Anyone who does client work knows that the people that contact them - particularly from the 70% not using a CMS - are deciding which platform to use and the choices are almost always WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. Suggesting that there isn't a competition between the platforms is absurd.

As the shift toward content maangement systems continues, will companies choose WordPress, Drupal or some other option? Right now, Drupal is getting a share of this new business, but it's not keeping pace with WordPress. 

So why does Buytaert dismiss the competition with WordPress and suggest focusing on the commercial content management systems?

It's All About the Enterprise

Dries Buytaert is the founder of Acquia, a commercial Drupal services company. Acquia's focus is on large enterprise clients. I recently reviewed a white paper they make available on their site discussing the total cost of ownership for various social publishing platforms.

If you read through it you'll notice that they are discussing Drupal vs. a number of commercial products. The commercial products mentioned are all at least $100,000 per year to license, some significantly more.

Does that sound like the market your business is operating in? Maybe, but it does not describe a large number of the sites built and managed by the Drupal community.

Remember that I mentioned that Buytaert singled out SiteCore and Open Text? Although their overall market share is quite low, they are very strong among the largest sites on the internet - the enterprise space.

Drupal isn't even close in this market segment and WordPress is in even worse shape.

We Need to Win Small Business

Most of you reading this will likely make your living either working in a small business or selling to one. You will know from first hand experience that what I'm saying about the competition Drupal faces is true. 

It is not helpful in my view to have someone as influential as Dries Buytaert say WordPress is not the competition. The harm it does is to redirect the limited marketing resources of the Drupal community away from the small business segment toward the enterprise.  It also reduces the ability of the community to make an effective argument against a product that is clearly a competitor.

Instead, I'd like to argue for a balanced approach to the marketing of Drupal. Let's agree that it's not only the enterprise-level businesses we want to win, but small business as well. And if we want to win these small businesses over, we need to be able to make a compelling case for Drupal and that means addressing WordPress as a competitor.

In future posts I'm going to dig into this conversation a bit more deeply and talk about building a winning business case for Drupal. But I'd like to end by saying I love that Drupal is a viable enterprise solution. But focusing too much on marketing to the enterprise or failing to properly identify competitors doesn't help Drupal.

I think it does help those focused on providing enterprise solutions. I worry about the influence Acquia has on the marketing of Drupal and how well their interests align with those of the overall community.

I'm not taking shots at anyone here. Buytaert has done great things and Acquia is a great company. I respect them both, but more voices need to be heard. The competitive landscape that has been defined by Buytaert ignores the reality of competing in the small business space. It's a critical area for Drupal to win.

If you have an opinion on this subject, I'd love to hear it.