Forum add-ons is at least a 250,000 dollar market

principia said:
in how many years?
XF will be bigger - lets say in a year or two.
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Nahhh, there is no guarantee of that :) Who knows what the future holds.
Xenforo is more cool, though. Bigger? we'll see. I hope so.

The graph shows it from November 2010, which means the numbers are in the span of 29 months. The curve is going up, though
 
1. IPB Team & users provides tutorials for devs
http://www.invisionpower.com/support/guides/_/advanced-and-developers/
http://www.invisionpower.com/support/kb
http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/marketplace/developers.html
xf team not ! You'll not find 1 great OFFICIAL best practice thread for the "big stuff" on xf.com !
that's the small & BIG/most important difference;) For xenforo you have to spend your time with reading the code and learning it yourself (I'm not saying that it's bad! It's much better for the long run, but it's also very demotivating)

2. It SHOULDN'T happen, that there are still addons (even commercial addons ) available, which are breaking XF and other 3rd party addons because they're overwriting the original xenforo method and not even calling any parent methods or my favorite: calling models via new Model_Foo()... Yes, it's still happening, even with commercial addons! Reason => see point 1!

That's the other downside of the most powerful plugin system;)

3. the ipb market is MUCH BIGGER then xf ATM because of the problems in the past!
Let's see if the future will change it, till yet it was really hard, because of the lawsuite , which is finally history!
 
xf_phantom said:
3. the ipb market is MUCH BIGGER then xf ATM because of the problems in the past!
Let's see if the future will change it, till yet it was really hard, because of the lawsuite , which is finally history!
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Sorry, but 250 000$ is not big. No one can live from this.(ok, one Coder ;) )
Apple earns it in Seconds.
 
principia said:
Sorry, but 250 000$ is not big. No one can live from this.(ok, one Coder ;) )
Apple earns it in Seconds.
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Forum Owners is a tiny portion while you're talking about millions, if not billions of people for Apple.

Rigel Kentaurus said:
I feel Kier tutorials are all that is needed. It is a screencast of how to create an addon, and it is pretty good.

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/creating-a-simple-modification.3532/
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/editing-templates-and-defining-a-callback-for-pages.7226/
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Definitely not. For beginners (especially those without MVC background), XenForo is a pretty hard system to grasp. I'm trying to change this by introducing cheat sheets so that even beginners can get a crash course on MVC, the Zend framework and XenForo and use these knowledge to create simple addons, but this won't come very soon.

As for paid addons, I think at least some part of the money are missed out for donations towards open source projects. Unless I am that poor that my only way out is by coding (which I hope not), I will try to keep all my self-initiated projects open-source.
 
+1 for Kier's video tutorials. They are very easy to follow and well explained.

There is not so much you need to know about the Zend framework if you understood how XF applies MVC patterns.

Generally I recommend reading more about PHP object-oriented coding if you are new to coding XF add-ons. One of the best I found is PHP Object-Oriented Solutions by David Powers.
 
As principia says: 250k is peanuts for a marketplace. That's $500 bucks per addon provider.

However, it needs to be taken into account that the IPS marketplace is still young and growing fast. There surely is potential. Especially with the market leader loosing market share at an amazing rate.
 
XF will reach and exceed that easily if things continue as they are.....

Some quick math.....all total BS, of course!

10,000 relatively active users (two years in the future)

2,000 top users spend average of $200 per year on add-ons and subscriptions
3,000 next users spend $100 per year
5,000 lower users spend $50 per year.....

That's close to a million a year right there! This does not include those same developers doing a bit of custom work for XF folks, etc. and making more...

If history is any guide, there will be 2 or 3 (at most) developers who make the full living (or more) - because they have BOTH business sense and coding skills. Back with EE, the top firm was solspace, which supported a couple people and makes some decent bucks.

Then there will be another dozen or so who make a decent bucks...and then numerous who do it for free (open source, fun, etc.) and for some extra spending money.

All are good, IMHO.
:)
 
$250k total for over 2 years? If you account for the difference in time (about half), I would estimate the marketplace here to be comfortably 50% as big if not more.
 
That's nice, but we rather enjoy what we are developing. Plus the revenue we've received based off our single paid addon is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
 
craigiri said:
If you put all your energy into learning PHP and making add-ons, you'd be a wealth(ier) man.....
;)

It's all a matter of directing energy......
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Until you put in consideration the time it takes to a) initially develop, b) support and c) continued development.

While I've made a decent sum of money off my styles (not including customs) I haven't made enough to cover the time I spent developing my framework, though I have now covered my styles for the most part.

As others have said though, $250k really isn't all that much considering the age of IPB, the large customer base and the variety currently available. Also take into consideration that a lot of products are paid so there aren't that many alternatives.

Honestly, they just threw out large numbers for market spiel. If they don't give a breakdown of metrics it'll not give you a real clue into the profitability of the platform as the market is mostly dominated by a few big players, and less so by smaller ones.
 
Forsaken said:
Until you put in consideration the time it takes to a) initially develop, b) support and c) continued development.

While I've made a decent sum of money off my styles (not including customs) I haven't made enough to cover the time I spent developing my framework, though I have now covered my styles for the most part.

As others have said though, $250k really isn't all that much considering the age of IPB, the large customer base and the variety currently available. Also take into consideration that a lot of products are paid so there aren't that many alternatives.

Honestly, they just threw out large numbers for market spiel. If they don't give a breakdown of metrics it'll not give you a real clue into the profitability of the platform as the market is mostly dominated by a few big players, and less so by smaller ones.
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He said "all my energy" an energy that is enormous like the heat from the Sun.

Not everyone's energy is the same. Some are just light bulbs.
 
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