Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. Before we dive in, remember to check out impressivehost.net. It’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and submit your questions for upcoming guests. You’ll also find all our links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen.

With me today is Jamie Marsland, the head of WordPress YouTube. And this is part two of what was a very awesome episode that happened to go by lightning fast. And Jamie had a bunch of questions for me, which is an awesome flip of the script for this podcast. And so we’re picking up where we left off.

Jamie, you had some interesting questions when we were talking about basically industry trends around the need for WordPress or hosting companies to evolve the way in which they present WordPress. And we were talking about segmenting customers and trying to paint a much more personal picture for DIYers versus people who are interested in the technical underpinnings of hosting.

What’s the split between DIY users and agencies in WordPress hosting?

Jamie Marsland: Yeah. I’m gonna—these may be impossible questions, so forgive me for asking them. But one of the constant conversations I have in the forums I’m involved in, WordPress, is this split between DIYers and the agency professionals that are building sites. So it’d be interesting—you’re viewing that, but my question was do we have any sense of what that is in terms of—

I’ve asked a few hosting companies this and they’ve given me vague answers. But do you have in your head like, which is in my head, I have like the DIYers are 90% and the agencies are 10%.

Jesse Friedman: Mm-hmm.

Jamie Marsland: The next question follows on from that. If that’s true in terms of revenue, what does that look like in terms of the value to the host?

Jesse Friedman: It’s a great question. So this is a common theme that I talk to hosting companies, not just in this podcast, but just in my day-to-day. I’m talking to hosting companies all the time, and this is a question that I ask frequently because I want to keep my finger on the pulse of the situation.

So the number tends to be—it’s interesting how there’s so much of the same number being used when you talk to a hosting company that does not deal in only WordPress, so they have shared hosting that can be outside of WordPress, things like that. It tends to be about 70% of customers are choosing WordPress from that hosting company.

Oddly enough, the way in which they identify—it’s about 65 to 70% identify themselves as someone who’s building a website for themselves.

And so it’s about 30, 35% are building it for someone else. Now, that could mean a variety of things. That could be a freelancer, it could be a contractor, it could be an agency, it could be a variety of things.

Now. The volume of customers that you see are typically DIYers. It’s the vast majority of volume is those DIYers. However, the reason that hosting companies are taking a much larger focus on agencies is two-pronged. One is the DIYer costs more to serve, so their hosting company’s cost-to-serve increases, and they spend less.

So a DIYer who’s running a brick-and-mortar retail store may only value a website hosting plan at 15 bucks a month at max. And because they’re less educated in the technology that’s required to understand how to build a website, they’re much more likely to ask for support. And support is quite expensive to a hosting company.

Why are hosting companies focusing more on agencies than DIY users?

Jesse Friedman: Additionally, they will also make some rookie mistakes—choose bad passwords or upload malicious software inadvertently. And so that can cost the hosting company more money. So there’s this growing need for hosting companies to focus their efforts on acquiring more agencies.

And you’ll see this coming out of the woodworks. Almost every hosting company these days is either launching or working on some kind of agency program. And it’s to bring in these agencies that are lower volume, but they bring in a lot more revenue and they typically handle a lot more on their own.

So that’s the answer to your question.

Jamie Marsland: That’s a great answer. Follow on from that quickly. Do you think that’s the right strategy given where we’re going with technology and AI and the fact that—is there a risk that the agency market is gonna get smaller over the next five years because AI is making these tools much easier for folks to use?

What risks come with ignoring DIY WordPress users?

Jesse Friedman: I think the risk is in the fact that we’re leaving DIYers behind. And so when we think about the volume of these sites, it’s detrimental to the WordPress ecosystem because the DIYers are the vast majority of WordPress users across the globe. And it’s funny because when we think about the WordPress community.

People like yourself and me. We often think about the WordPress community as the people who show up on Slack or contributing plugins or go to a WordCamp, something like that. But there’s a wider audience. There’s a wider community there of people who don’t think about WordPress as a community.

They think about it as software that they use to reach their goals. And so in their minds, it’s no different than like Intuit’s tax software or Quicken or something like that. And so if we aren’t addressing their needs and helping them to be successful, they’re going to go with easier, more holistic programs like Shopify or Squarespace.

So I think the risk is greater that we end up leaving behind these customers. And one of the things that I think that we really need to do to solve for that is to get out of this race-to-the-bottom on pricing. It’s something that continues to plague the hosting industry that people will value a single website that can generate tons of money for their business at less than a cup of coffee a month. You look at unlimited hosting plans for $2.99 a month. You’re setting yourself up to be in a situation where you’re going to be acquiring customers at a loss, and then that builds up as a problem for that hosting company over time.

So if we as a hosting industry can shift out of this race-to-the-bottom and set a higher standard for pricing by providing better services and better solutions, reducing our cost-to-serve, we can actually use AI to address the needs of these DIYers and turn that larger volume of customers into a much larger profit center.

Jamie Marsland: Okay. Two final questions before we start, which are—one is, do you see this focus on agencies where—where has this manifested itself in terms of do you see this happening in terms of we’re neglecting DIYers? And the second part of that question was, do you think that hosting companies do enough around education at the moment in terms of—I mean, they should be, it should be self-interest, right? Reducing churn. But do you see that’s in a good place at the moment, or do you think that’s a big gap where we could be helping them do more?

Jesse Friedman: You know what’s funny is, one of the questions that I had set aside for you was, so you have this amazing YouTube channel. If a hosting company’s responsibility is to the success of their customer, and that comes with education, a lot of times I think in the mind of a hosting company, they’re thinking to themselves, well, now I have to generate all this unique content and I have to create our own YouTube channel and a library of things.

And I think that becomes problematic because a hosting company is afraid to reuse something or use something that any other hosting company can benefit from at the same time, which is interesting because it’s built on open source software that we’re all using anyway. So there are ways to differentiate ourselves.

So I think absolutely that a hosting company has a responsibility to the end customer to educate them because the more likely that they are successful with WordPress, the better it is for the ecosystem, the better it is for the host. But let me ask you this. This is a very specific question.

If you found out that a hosting company started embedding your YouTube videos directly into the WP Admin as a way to help create a little bit better of a connection with that end customer and teach them something in real time, how would you feel about that?

How can hosting companies better educate their users?

Jamie Marsland: I’d be 100% delighted that that happened. Yeah, if anyone wants to do that.

Jesse Friedman: The reason I ask is because years ago I worked for a company where we had these insurance agents who had no experience with the web come in and they had to write content for their website. And at the time, we bought a license for like WP 101, which for those at home, it was basically a library of videos that was constantly updated with every new release of WordPress on how to do very specific things. How do you create a blog post? How do you upload an image? Things like that. And I literally wrote a plugin to insert that video into the little helper bar that drops down from the top of WordPress so that there was actually better, more helpful content inside the WP admin.

And it got me thinking about that with a hosting company. It’s like, I bet you if I were to ask the next five hosting companies that I have on this show, if they would feel comfortable doing that, I bet you most of them would say no. That would feel uncomfortable, it would feel wrong. It would feel like I’m using Jamie’s content in a way to make profit or make money, and I don’t wanna do that.

And so what they end up doing is nothing. They don’t end up doing anything and they rely on their own support staff to help these customers. But I think there’s so much more that we could be doing to help educate.

Jamie Marsland: Yeah, this sounds like a great project for a WordPress.org project where it’s just actually at the org level and then that—I mean, you’ve triggered an idea in my head, so that’s really good. Thank you for that. Yeah. I think that.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. I mean, I would love to—I mean, if you categorize your videos in that way, you could definitely be injecting them basically right into the WP admin and give people the ability to watch them right in there.

Jamie Marsland: Yeah, I mean that’d be kind of awesome. Yeah. Cool. Okay. That’s, that was my final question. So thank you for that. That was really interesting around the market. Because it’s a common thing I see, especially in the—I think when you go into these forums, especially the developer forums and the sort of professional agency forums, they have a—I think they think that those folks think that it’s 90% agencies and 10% DIYers, and I think the market is very, very, very, very different to that.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Let me ask you one last question because I know you need to go, and this is gonna end up being a shorter episode. But when you think about the fact that you are building a community on YouTube, a platform that you don’t control and that functions off of an algorithm that you don’t control.

And a connection with a community that you don’t own. Right? I’ve talked about this before, this idea that influencers need to own their influence and how WordPress can play a role in that. Leave us off with—help us understand the strategy that WordPress plays. In a world where you are building YouTube videos and content on a closed source, walled garden platform that you don’t control, but you do have the ability to embed those videos in an open source platform like WordPress.

So what role does WordPress play in helping you to build and strengthen your community on YouTube?

Can you build a community when using platforms you don’t control?

Jamie Marsland: Well, all my videos go on my website anyway. So I do have a place where I kind of control to some degree. But we are now in a world where we are building on rented land. A lot of us, in terms of our influence, we are increasingly in a world of zero clicks.

So it’s harder and harder to track where your clicks are coming from. So we’re in an interesting space. I’ve just been actually talking to James LePage, who’s just heading up the AI initiative for WordPress.org around some of the stuff we’re doing in terms of making WordPress available to AI.

So I think we’re in a really transformational space. We are the only generation that’s gonna know before AI and after AI. Every point is gonna—it’s gonna be like when they have to reset 100-meter records after they found somebody who’s taken drugs.

Right? We’re never gonna be in the period now from this point on where nothing isn’t AI. And our grandchildren are gonna know AI. We’re the only generation that’s known before and after it. So we’re in an incredibly transformational time. And I think from a content creation point of view, I don’t have the answer to your question, but I’m rambling on about something else.

I think from a content creation point of view, our customers are gonna go through this enormous period of disruption. We don’t know what that looks like. They don’t know what that looks like, but it’s gonna be crazy disruptive. Lots of people are gonna be disrupted. And I think our job as creators creating content is to reflect that honestly and more than ever to be a trusted guide through this incredible tumult that we’re all about to go through. And I think then you build trust. I spend a lot of time building my email list off my YouTube videos as well.

So I do have that community that I can directly relate to in terms of communicating.

Jesse Friedman: And that’s hugely helpful. If anything were to be disrupted on the YouTube side, you could then go communicate to those customers, those viewers via email. You could communicate to them via the website. Do you try to drive conversation to the website, like the YouTube comment section is quite powerful.

Do you try to push some of that to the WordPress website?

Jamie Marsland: Nope. I mean, I don’t—you know, to get any kind of comments on YouTube is hard, but some videos get tons and tons of engagement. And so yeah, you’re kind of just—again, you’re just having those conversations in the places, in the various places, whether it’s on X or it’s on LinkedIn or it’s on YouTube.

You’re just kind of having those conversations. Just be grateful for them. Where they are.

Jesse Friedman: Where they are.

Jamie Marsland: Where they are. Yeah.

Absolutely. So it’s not ideal in terms of we’re beholden to YouTube. One of the reasons I love YouTube though, is it’s not like—because in my old business, you were driving a lot of revenue through SEO.

What makes YouTube an effective platform for engagement?

Jamie Marsland: It’s not the same as SEO. You’re driving engagement through this human connection that you have on video. And most of the views come not through search on YouTube at all. They come because YouTube is recommending these videos to people that have watched them and are enjoying them. So for me it’s a much more—unless they make lots of changes, the algorithm is incentivized to push videos that people are actually enjoying and engaging with.

And the level of engagement you get with video completely exceeds anything else I’ve ever done. Like I used to go to WordCamps and walk around completely anonymously, and then I went to—it struck me like a bolt from the blue when I went to WordCamp Athens a few years ago, and I’d literally been walking around these WordCamps completely anonymously for years.

And then literally within about five minutes of walking through the door, I had people walking up to me wanting selfies, which was weird. Purely because they—

Jesse Friedman: You’re a celebrity now.

Jamie Marsland: My kids call me a micro-influencer, which is you’re kind of so small that if you walk down the street normally nobody’s gonna recognize you, but if you go to an event, then people come up to you and take selfies. So video has an incredible power that the written word does as well, but it’s incredible to see it in person. You probably get—

Jesse Friedman: I think that speaks to the medium of it, but I think it also speaks to the impact that you are personally making on people’s lives. Like they’re not only excited for it because it’s good video content and all that stuff, but it’s also because it’s actually helping them to be successful.

And it’s driving that for them. So they’re probably tying their feelings of pride and other things directly to seeing you in person, which is very cool.

Jamie Marsland: Very nice to say. I mean, the other thing to say is I absolutely love YouTube and I love the process of video making and I love everything about getting good at YouTube. So the learning around—which you’ve probably seen as well, going through your own journey. It’s like, I find it fascinating how you construct a video to get people to watch it.

I find that whole creative process just incredibly exciting. So if anyone wants help with YouTube, come and talk to me.

Jesse Friedman: Well, actually, you know, one of the things we didn’t get to, which I really want to talk about, so maybe you could come back on the show in the future, would be—I wanna talk about speed builds because they seem to be growing and becoming quite cool and maybe even a sport in themselves. But we didn’t have a chance to talk about that today, and that’s okay.

So in the meantime, what we did learn though is that if there is a hosting company out there that wants to leverage your videos to help educate their customers. They should absolutely feel free to do that. And if they want to do that, where do they go? What’s the website and what’s the YouTube channel name?

Jamie Marsland: The YouTube channel is JamieWP, so just YouTube, JamieWP, or just search for WordPress. And you’ll probably see my face lurking on YouTube somewhere. I’m on Twitter at Poodle Press. And I work for Automattic, so you can find me there as well. That’s probably enough places to find me.

Jesse Friedman: And we’ll put a bunch of this stuff in the show notes too. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us. It was a real pleasure. I hope to have you on again soon.

Jamie Marsland: Thank you.