WordAds – Where To From Here.

By Jon Burke | | 12

Since launching WordAds earlier this year we are proud to have launched advertising on thousands of WordPress.com sites. Our goal has been to free bloggers from the weight of managing the complex and fast moving online advertising arena. Thanks to our negotiation leverage with advertisers and technical resources, WordAds is delivering returns that bloggers would not see on their own.

There is much that we want to accomplish in the remainder of the year. Here’s our road-map as well as common requests that are not on the road-map:

  • Transition more sites to Optimized Ads. Many sites don’t want to have more ads and they can stay with Basic Ads. Others want to earn more per page. We are working to get more approvals from advertisers for those sites.
  • Ads layout choices. We plan to roll-out an easy, self-service way for WordAds users to switch between Basic Ads and Optimized Ads.
  • Notifications. We plan to add notifications in your WordPress.com console to alert you when you have your earnings, when you had your top earnings and when you have been paid.
  • Mobile Ads payout lift. We currently see fairly poor payouts from mobile ad placements. We plan a good amount of testing to find improvements there, as traffic shifts from Web to mobile.
  • Back-end tools so that WordAds can more quickly respond to your requests.

There are some other frequent requests from WordAds users that we do not plan to add this year.

  • Real-time reports. WordAds is not an ad network like Adsense that can provide real-time data. We only get reports from advertisers once per month so its not possible for us to provide real-time data.
  • Self-service ad sales. We hear from sites that they want to sell ads to local advertisers or advertisers in their niche. Our tests have show that there is not significant income potential here so we are going to continue to focus on broad national and international advertisers for now.
  • Bartering of earnings for WordPress.com premiums credits. We think this is a great idea to offer sites premium themes and other upgrades in exchange for ads earnings. However, it requires some financial software development that cannot be output in short-order.
  • Customized Ad placement. We often hear from WordAds sites that they want to place ads where they want. We do not plan to offer this as we have signed agreements with advertisers that are paying premium rates for specific locations.

We look forward to your feedback and comments about what matters most to you.

Comments

  2. Very helpful and informative report. I’m going to follow the WordAds blog so I stay up to date. I’ve been working to improve one of my blogs, http://johnhaydeninmd.com; and trying to decide how to proceed with the other one, http://marylandonmymind.com. Just bought a state-of-the-art digital camera to try to move up to the next level.

    I wonder if you’ve thought about creating new Themes specifically designed to maximize the effectiveness of WordAds? If you come out with with such a Theme, I’d be delighted to be a beta tester.

      1. Thanks so much! I’ve been obsessing over themes and will limit my decision-making to this list.

      2. Hi John B! Could you give me an example of a Twenty Ten blog with running WordAds, preferably a european site? I’ve been trying to look for one, but couldn’t find it.
        Thank so much in advance,
        Giulia

      3. I recently applied for WordAds, I didn’t see Oxygen as a good theme for the ads. Can I still be able to use that theme?

  3. Jon Burke ! I am little bit in ambiguity . Actually, I am here from an “Add Box” that is showing in my WordPress.com blog after my post . As I know, this is an Add Program & I heard If I want to earn from Adds I can .

    Could you tell me please how will I start to earn from Adds and what is process to get money in my hand. Also, Is there any option to stop adds in future ?

    Thanks in Advance

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