The Difference Between Wordpress and Facebook
Is about $14.8bn according to the publicly available information about the most recent financings of the two companies ($15bn for Facebook and $200mm for Automattic). — But consider this comscore chart of unique visitors over the past year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Fred Wilson's post lands in the middle of a running debate over Facebook's valuation. Earlier coverage had already questioned the $15bn Microsoft-era price tag — Scripting News asked what Facebook is actually worth back in 2007 — and a month before this post, Mark Evans pressed Automattic's Matt Mullenweg on how WordPress would ever make money. Wilson's contribution is to pit those two valuations against Comscore traffic data: WordPress.com's unique visitors were approaching Facebook's despite a roughly $14.8bn gap between the two companies' most recent financings.
First-order effects
- The comparison directly challenges the $15bn Facebook valuation: if traffic is comparable, private-market pricing is being driven by something other than audience size — engagement, demographics, or hype — and investors in that round are exposed.
- For Automattic, the post is free validation: a prominent VC arguing its $200mm valuation looks conservative relative to peers gives Mullenweg leverage in future fundraising and monetization conversations.
Second-order effects
- If VCs begin discounting raw-traffic-based valuations, later rounds get priced on revenue and engagement metrics instead — pressuring Facebook to prove monetization and pushing open-source/publishing platforms like Automattic to articulate a business model beyond scale.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a durable split in how markets value social networks versus infrastructure/publishing platforms — a gap that persisted for years, as Automattic's later raises show it climbing from $200mm toward billion-dollar-plus territory while remaining far below Facebook's eventual public-market value. Whether traffic parity ever translates into valuation parity remains an open question this post only frames.
The trend: This is an early data point in the long-running tension between audience-scale valuations and business-model-backed valuations in consumer internet companies.