How to find WordPress.com third party themes, now that they don’t blog them

Did you know that WordPress.com doesn’t blog about third party themes any more? It’s been that way for a few months now.

I started following a new Twitter account called @wpcomthemes so that I can keep up with new releases. The account tweets both Automattic and third party releases, which have still been released on a weekly-ish basis.

All in all, I counted 139 commercial WordPress themes now on WordPress.com. Of those, I counted 36 commercial themes from Automattic. So we’ve recently passed a threshold of 100 commercial themes by third parties, and who knows how many free ones.

You can check out all WordPress.com themes here. Finding a full list of third party themers is a challenge, though the authors themselves have a better understanding of how their themes are doing (and maybe how they’re doing against others).

I know for a fact that when I counted early last year, one or two theme shops appeared to have done close to a million dollars in revenue on WordPress.com; then they took down the stats of active blogs using a theme, and I don’t know any more.

A number of theme companies are relying pretty heavily on the WordPress.com marketplace for sustaining sales that seem to be nearly universally declining on self-hosted installs — outside of marketplaces like ThemeForest.

By the way, Envato did their year in review as well. It’s nuts.