Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session.

I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that’s like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code, and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you’re in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom.

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For those that haven’t been following the relevant bits of tech social media this last week, here’s the insanity you’ve missed:

1. Wix start their new marketing campaign by posting headphones and a secret video link to people they clearly think are WordPress “influencers”. But the video is so confusing that people thought it was a WordPress marketing campaign against Wix, not the other way around.
2. Next, Wix launch their “You Deserve Better” website, attempting to riff off the old “Mac vs. PC” ads. It’s been perhaps most-charitably described as a “bewildering” attack ad, more-critically described as being insensitive and distasteful.
3. Wix’s Twitter and YouTube responses suddenly swing from their usual “why is your customer service so slow to respond to me?” level of negative to outright hostile. LOL.

Sure, I’m not the target audience. I’ve been a WordPress user for 15 years, and every time I visit a Wix site it annoys me when I have to permit a stack of third-party JavaScript just to load images like they’ve never heard of the <img>tag or something. Hell, I like WordPress enough that I used it as a vehicle to get a job with Automattic, a company most-famous for its WordPress hosting provision. But even putting all of that aside: this advertising campaign stinks.