Matt Mullenweg, of Automattic, announced at WordCamp Argentina that Automattic will soon launch a service for premium WordPress themes. The idea? To provide a repository of ‘premium’ WordPress themes for sale. Designers make 50% of the revenue from themes that sell - - Automattic pockets the other 50%.
It will be interesting to see if this kills the free WordPress theme offerings. From a designers standpoint - why continue offering up free themes when you can submit them to this WordPress Themes Marketplace and make a buck, or two.
And what will the going price be for these premium themes? Is it a standard price - for instance will it be a blanket price for all themes? If not, will Automattic valuate each theme? Based on what criteria? Or will the designer be allowed to set the price? Maybe it will be an auction-type setup where users can bid on the themes that are only sold once?
I will guess that the designers who continue to provide good quality free themes to the WordPress community have more of an opportunity to get their names out and about, than designers who stick with the paid, premium themes. And there will always be a market for custom themes
Good designers are out there. A quick search on Google will help you find them and the themes they offer - - either free or premium. As a designer myself, I cringe at the idea of giving anyone 50% of the profit from my work. However, on the flip side - this will be a nice opportunity for theme users to find some good, quality themes for their sites.
As I’m writing this, I checked the original post and Toni Schneider (of Automattic) posted a clarifying comment to the thread:
Some bits of information seem to have gotten lost in the translation here. Most crucially, the theme marketplace will be launched for WordPress.com (not WordPress.org) users. We are enabling theme designers to offer paid themes to over 1.7MM WordPress.com users who currently can’t upload custom themes. The marketplace is separate from the existing thriving world of open source WordPress.org themes. Also, theme designers will set the price for their themes, not Automattic.
That clarifies things a bit more. WordPress.com users need to have a solution for customized themes. Other hosted blog solutions like Typepad and Blogger give their users the ability to customize their themes, as well as having a handful of premade, standard themes available to them. Although, Typepad and Blogger give their users that ability at no cost - as far as I know, WordPress.com is the only free, hosted solution that requires payment for such abilities.
Now, if only WordPress.com will allow their users to monetize their blogs a little.
UDATE - Matt Mullenweg made a post on his blog to clarify the Themes Marketplace issue:
Right now WordPress.com is a little bit like a clothing store with only XXL men’s pink ponchos available — not a lot of selection. We’d like to offer more products, hence the idea of a theme marketplace.
Imagine you’re a theme designer and if you do a custom one-off theme for a site like this you may get $500. (Keeping the numbers simple for the sake of argument.) Making a good theme is really hard, and you may only be able to do one a week. Now imagine you made a theme and uploaded it to our theme marketplace, then set a price of $50. You’re now an option on the dashboard of 1,736,206 blogs, if we split the price evenly and 20 of those 1,736,206 blogs purchase the theme, you just made as much as you would doing a one-off design. You can plug in different numbers and assumptions there and it’s pretty easy to see how this could be big for designers.
No offense to XXL men wearing pink ponchos, of course 
