WordPress Introduces WordAds

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world today, hosting over 24 million blogs while running on 15 percent of the world’s most visited sites. WordPress has announced recently that it will offers its users a way to make money from their blogs. The company’s advertising platform will be known as WordAds, which will compete directly with AdSense by Google.

WordPress is owned by Automattic and previously started a partnership with Federated Media back in October. The company did not release any details about the agreement at the time. There has not been much information released about WordAds yet but it more than likely will operate much like AdSense from Google. This means that bloggers will be able to publish hyper-linked word advertisements on their website based on the content that the site publishes. This program will then generate money that is based on the number of page views acquired by the site and the amount of time a person clicks on each advertisement.

“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,” said WordPress Ads Lead Jon Burke.

The blogs that are hosted on WordPress.com are usually done so by people for a hobby or a side job. These blogs should not be confused with the ones that are hosted on the free service known as WordPress.org or the premium service known as WordPress VIP. Blogs hosted on WordPress.com typically cannot be edited by the user too much, which means most third-party widgets or advertising applications are not supported. This also limited how much money the site could generate up until now. With the advent of WordAds, blogs hosted on WordPress.com can now help bloggers make a good source of income simply by writing down their thoughts each day.

Even though the program is known as WordAds, it will primarily deal with display advertising, not text-based advertising, with ads such as banners and pictures. These types of ads are similar to what Federated Media offers its other clients VentureBeat and BoingBoing. The products or services featured in the ads will still depend on what type of content is published on the site.

“Up until now, we’ve always focused on the feature functionality and less on the monetization side for the bloggers,” Burke said. “We wanted to approach the ad side in a way that still allows bloggers to focus on editorial and marketing.”