Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace are marketing absolutely everywhere, and spending fortunes to do so.
The 3 companies listed here are on course to spend well over $200 million on marketing in 2015.
In total, the 3 companies had revenues $141 million (Wix), $105 million (Shopify) and perhaps around $100 million (Squarespace), although they don’t disclose their numbers.
These 3 companies, making about $350 million, are spending far over 50% of their budgets on marketing this year. In comparison, according to Gartner, the average company spend only 10.2% of their budget on marketing.
And, we haven’t even started to total the spending by GoDaddy, Web.com, Weebly and others in this space.
Insanity. But there is no denying that multiple WordPress-centric companies could be in this same battle if they chose to be. For instance, think if WooCommerce introduced a hosted eCommerce option. Or what if Happytables takes off or receives venture capital? So many options, and the market is still so young.
It does kind of gross me out that these guys are spending 50%+ of revenues on marketing. No wonder they have huge operating deficits. While these make for fancy commercials and big campaigns, there is something very appealing about the slow and steady approach most WordPress-centric companies utilize (and I include Automattic there).
