advertising

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

Frederic Lardinois

Nov 29, 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.

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls

Read more

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

🪧 Pressed words

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

The week after CrowdStrike