Podcasting service and media hosting company Blubrry launched a Patreon campaign to help support ongoing development of its popular PowerPress plugin for WordPress. Blubrry has provided the plugin to podcasters completely for free since the plugin was first released in 2008. Since then, PowerPress has been used to create tens of thousands of unique podcast RSS feeds. Blubrry is hoping that the podcasting community will return the favor by supporting its efforts thru Patreon:
…we want to do more for you, the content and the content creators you love. We are deeply committed to providing this free tool to the podcasting world; our ambitions for our podcast content creators and their audiences are endless, and we want you to come with us for the ride.
As a Patron, you’ll find Blubrry has an extensive road-map of upgrades and new enhancements to the plugin in the works. We provide regular insider looks at our features before they are released and are committed to considering and implementing ideas from sponsors.
Blubrry’s Patreon campaign has several reward levels to offer when specific funding goals are reached. This include things like producing a detailed PowerPress tutorial as well as redesigns to the PowerPress setup page and user interface. Blubrry also states that the Patreon campaign will help the company in these key ways:
- Maintaining a 30-60 day enhancement cycle for all products (including PowerPress)
- Feature requests submitted by patrons will get higher priority than other requests
- Continuing to provide free technical support to users
- Hiring dedicated PowerPress developers (in addition to Angelo Mandato, the original and current lead developer of PowerPress)
To learn more about Blubrry’s Patreon campaign and become a patron, follow the link at the top of this post.
Disclosure: I work part-time with the Blubrry support team and Podcaster News Executive Editor Todd Cochrane is the CEO of Rawvoice, parent company of Blubrry.
Bit torn on this one. I always figured PowerPress was free as it pretty heavily pushed Blubrry’s hosting service. If the plugin is funded by patreon will the plugin become less attached to their hosting services?
Open disclosure: Creating an alternative podcast hosting site. Love the PowerPress plugin but unfortunately it’d be silly to recommend it due to it pushing Blubrry’s hosting service
Cohan, There are 40,000 podcasters that use Powerpress, the majority using a variety of hosting services. We are simply wanting to get development support for the plugin. If Podcasters find it valuable, and wants to help support ongoing development of the plugin regardless of who they host with we hope they will consider becoming a Patreon.
We do not heavily advertise our hosting in the plugin (we could), we mention it a total of 2 places, but I am sure you can understand their are 1000’s of hours of development in the plugin, obviously we hope podcasters host with us. We have a full time staff, and devote considerable resources to the plugin everyday that other hosting companies benefit from on our dime.
The other option is that we would love for you to host with us we migrate podcasters for free. They then can post – upload – publish on their own site without logging into a third party hosting site.. You can even try it for free by using promo code blubrry005.
I hope this helps you in deciding to support PowerPress as a Patron. Happy Podcasting