Another interesting statistic we noticed was that 57% of the CodeCanyon plugins came from authors who had 5 or more plugins in the store versus 23% plugins in the repository. This indicates that the majority of CodeCanyon authors are writing 5 or more plugins. This could mean several things.
One factor that springs to our mind is around economics. The WordPress repository is firmly based on Community and Open Source. There is clearly economic intent from some authors, but there could also be a community aspect to it. Additionally, there are plugins where the economic upside is not in the plugin – Facebook for instance – so they ‘give away’ the plugin and monetize in some other way.
CodeCanyon, by contrast, is typically 100% focused on generating revenue through the plugin sales. This appears to be beneficial because majority of authors are coming back with additional plugins. It would seem reasonable that they would make efforts for the second, third, fourth plugin etc. provided they prove to be profitable.
Looking at the upper extremes was also interesting. The largest number of plugins we found published under one author was 48 in the WordPress repository – this was from the crew at YITH. By contrast, on CodeCanyon, we saw 63 plugins from an author called webkul.
YITH is very much a commercial interest, so it would seem the WordPress approach is a profitable venture given their large amounts of plugins. This would also seem to indicate that both venues offer good economics for authors to keep coming back and create more plugins. However, CodeCanyon seems to generate more authors who are willing to build more plugins.