New York — Voluntary bloggers on one of the world’s prominent blogging platforms and content management systems, WordPress can now rejoice, as the company over the weekend unfurled new advertising program called “WordAds”, in association with Federated Media that would allow bloggers to monetize their free, hosted blogs on WordPress.com via online advertising.
The program, dubbed as WordAds, has been developed in collaboration with advertising and publishing company, Federated Media that aims to offer bloggers an alternative to Google’s AdWords for monetizing their sites.
According to a statement by WordPress’ parent company Automattic, Jon Burke, ads lead for WordPress.com, said that bloggers have been asking WordPress.com for quite some time to introduce a monetization program, but “we have resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen was not terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad.”
While Google AdSense for long has been an advertising option open to everyone, more financially rewarding ad networks like Federated are only open to websites with a certain amount of traffic. WordPress has recognized this, and this partnership may allow WordPress bloggers access to more advertising dollars than if they had tried to make a go of it with their own sites.
“Our main purpose is to create something that rewards bloggers for their diligent work and the quality of their work, and do so at a higher level than generic AdSense would, not optimize around a particular revenue share,” said WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in a statement. “No plans for a .org plugin or supporting non-WordPress sites yet, but a plugin is definitely something we will consider in the future.”
Speaking to Memeburn, Mullenweg confirmed this, describing that the main motive behind WordAds was the fact that “since WordPress.com was started, six years ago, advertising has been our #1 feature request”.
“We resisted because we had not found a model for advertising on blogs that we liked. Now we have.”
Moving forward, WordPress, which Burke mentioned that signs around 50,000 new blogs every day, had apparently received requests over the years to enable advertising on the blogs created by its users, but held off the temptation because of the poor quality of other online ads. In what is very definitely a poke at Google, Burke said that 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.” Ads from Federated Media, which was founded by John Battelle, apparently changed his tune.
(Credit: Screenshot by CNET)
Burke, however, did not exposed any details about how WordAds would be different from AdWords. “You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense,” he added.
Mullenweg took a further dig at Google’s advertising products, saying:
AdWords and Adsense are very competent marketplaces, but cold and sterile, robotic in every sense of the word. Could you imagine seeing Adsense in the New Yorker magazine? GQ? The independent web is a creative place, and deserves creative ad and sponsorship partners to match.
The new WordAds feature will be optional and geared toward bloggers who want to earn money by allowing “high-quality” ads to appear on their blogs, the company said. The program will be available for WordPress.com blogs, but not WordPress.org self-hosted blogs, according to a company spokeswoman.
If you are a creative content creator or a business organization looking at setting up a free site on WordPress.com, you face certain hurdles, not the least of which is only being allowed to choose from certain themes rather than fully customizing the look of your site. However, for free, WordPress.com certainly becomes much more attractive with the offer of better monetization for your blog.
According to the application form, the criteria for selection for WordAds is:
-
Level of engagement
-
Amount of traffic
-
Quality of content
-
Language used
These criteria are pretty liberal for the WordAds program to be limited to the same kind of premium sites that Federated Media would usually accept as advertisers. It remains to be seen if you would have the same shot getting on board with such a high-quality ad network with your WordPress.com blog site versus a site you started yourself.
The post directs users to fill out a form if they are interested. And, if you do not have a blog but were planning on starting one, you can sign up for your own custom domain by visiting WordPress.com.
Besides, the page directing users to the form notes that joining WordAds is “100% optional” and that Federated Media sells ads for BoingBoing and Apple Insider.