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WordPress.com Now Lets (Some) Bloggers Monetize Their Sites with Ads

Frederic Lardinois

29 Nov 2011 — 1 min read

Automattic’s WordPress.com just announced that some of its users will now be able to run display ads on their sites. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms around today. Including the hosted WordPress.com site and its self-hosted cousin WordPress, more than 50,000 new blogs running this software come online every day. Until now, however, users of the hosted service didn’t really have an option to monetize their ads. Now, thanks to a partnership with online advertising company Federated Media, WordPress.com bloggers will be able to run ads on their sites.

It’s worth noting that this just applies to a very specific subset of sites for now, though. Bloggers will have to apply to be part of this program and own a custom domain for their blogs. WordPress will select sites based on “level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog.” What exactly the benchmarks for inclusion are, however, isn’t clear. Federated Media generally only works with larger sites written in English, but is clearly making some exceptions for WordPress.com.

WordPress.com’s announcement doesn’t mention any financial details, besides rightly noting that bloggers “deserve better than [Google’s] AdSense.”

WordPress.com still explicitly prohibits the use of other advertising services on its site, though, including Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds, as well as sponsored posts through PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and Smorty.

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