Blogging platform WordPress.com has introduced WordAds, letting people carry ads on their blogs and make money from them.
The new advertising service is part of a recent deal that WordPress.com developer Automattic made with Federation Media to offer their users the ability to show advertisements on their blogs.
The service is called WordAds and users must apply to WordPress.com to get the ability to host ads on their blogs. It will be open to publicly visible blogs with their own custom domains and WordPress.com will consider the blog’s traffic, engagement, content and language used before accepting them.
According to Jon Burke, who manages advertising on Automattic, there are more than 50,000 WordPress.com blogs coming online each day. He said WordPress.com resisted advertising for some time but he believes they’ve ‘cracked it’ now. He also took a shot at Google’s AdSense platform.
“Over the years, one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads.
“We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense,” he said.
