About two years ago, we announced that we were running some experimental Google ads on post and tag pages. It was an announcement that was necessary because, as it turned out, they were so discreet you didn’t even notice them.
As we said in our original post:
The ad code tries hard not to intrude or show ads to regular readers, which means a small percentage of page views [might have an ad].
We seemed to have lucked in to a good balance with this approach, and don’t plan to change anything there. (Most of your readers will never see an ad.) As an added bonus the light advertising has allowed us to focus on free features for you guys rather than paid upgrades, and enabled us to invest in infrastructure so your blog is always fast and reliable and never shows a fail whale.
At the same time it’s easy to imagine blogs that would never want ads on them: businesses, startups, non-profits, political activist sites, the list goes on. Google Adsense analyzes the content to show contextually relevant ads, but that might mean a link to a competitor. Because of this we’ve introduced a premium option that gives you control: the No-ads upgrade.
With this upgrade, no one, whether they’re logged in or not, will see any ads on your blog. Ever. (Or at least as long as you subscribe to the upgrade.)
The No-ads upgrade can be purchased for 30 credits a year ($0.08 a day) through the Upgrades tab in your blog’s dashboard.
UPDATE 10/02: Comments on this post are now closed. Thank you for your feedback, everyone.
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hanx for this option! Keep up the good work!
I think I’ll move to blogger!
thanks !
I appreciate how hard all of you Word Press staffers work. You, Matt, and all of your team. It really makes our lives better. Really. WordPress has offered so much to the public, the concepts, the freedom, all the options, affordability should be at the top of that list, and everything just keeps getting more and more sophisticated and truly helpful. I just want to say thanks.
This is great as in tradeoff. An ads for better functions, why not?
When I left Blogger and came to wordpress.com I did so for four reasons.
(1) I dislike advertising on blogs.
(2) Blogger was full of blogs that upon close examination proved to be splogs, spam blogs and blogs with low quality content that were being pimped for advertising income.
(3) Blogger had a slow and unresponsive support team.
(4) wordpress.com had no advertising, great support and splogs, spammers and blog pimpers were not a problem here.
I’m glad to see you delivered the option of purchasing an upgrade to have an ad free blog. However, I’m concerned that introducing an option to allow blogger initiated adverting at a future date would cause an immediate increase in the number of splog, spam blogs and the blogs with low quality content being pimped out for advertising income. Consequently, I hope that an option to allow blogger initiated advertising is not introduced at wordpress.com.
…Wordpress,
oh WordPress…
oh how do I love thee….
tHanks fOR everYThing tHat yOu’Ve done wiTh tHis serVICE
Alright, so let me tell you what’s bothering me. We have a sports blog with 11 authors and have worked pretty hard to make the thing a success. A large source of referrals for sports sites come from yardbarker. We’d like to be a member of the yardbarker network, which adds a nifty little icon next to your posts, adding a bit of credibility to your site. For whatever reason, it results in more clickthroughs to your site. In order to become a member of the yardbarker network, you have to place a yardbarker banner on your site, which we are not allowed to do using wordpress.
Long story short, I’d love to be able to pay a fee to be able to post banners/ads on my site. I probably wouldn’t do much more than throw a yardbarker banner up there and maybe a stubhub ad just to offset prices for wordpress upgrades.
The fact that people here are complaining about the minimal ads on a free blog is ridiculous. You just expect WordPress to let you host unlimited blogs and 3GBs of space totally for free? What a sense of entitlement.
For those of you who don’t like the ads, you are free to move to blogger or typepad. Not a big deal. I think this new setup is a perfect balance.
To summarize for all of the people who don’t quite get this: Nothing is changing, other than the ability to remove all ads. Ads are not increasing; don’t worry.
Now, will some people please get off of their high horses and realize the WordPress needs to make some revenues?
Dearest Matt,
I personally wanted to include ads to generate a little income spending so much time blogging on wordpress. I felt that at least some of us hardcore bloggers deserve a little “incentive” by putting in the effort. I can’t seemed to include add codes onto my side bars. Correct me if I am wrong for not keeping abreast with the latest feature if ads has been allowed.
TLR
Would it be possible to wrap the ads in an element that has some kind of strapline that shows the ads have been placed by WP?
great, thank you!
Matt, Im your fan, I mean I’ve been in love with wordpress for years.
But buying upgrades for everything?!
Domain mapping.
CSS.
And now this?
Time to move to self-hosted wordpress.
Thanks
Matt, i’m just moving from blogger. I find WordPress extremely easy, useful and convenient. I haven’t see an ad yet, because i don’t care about. WordPress is perfect for my blogging needs. I find writing as a passion. I love to write about things i’m interested. The point here is that doing it so, demands time for me. Instead of getting a job, i’m here posting on the web. Blogger lets me earn from ads that I choose to put discretly on my site. The reality is that I’ve not enough traffic in my site, so i don’t get a dime. I think that if i post regularly quality posts, over the time, the traffic on my blog will be incrementing over time and so my chances for a revenue. I love WordPress but you cut me the possibility of getting a little remuneration for expending time in one of my passions.
Now that i0m thinking about it, i got two suggestions: 1. That you let users to embbed ads and get his money and wordpress takes a comission. or 2. WordPress makes money putting discrete ads on the user blogs and pay us for writing quality posts and for generating quality traffic that watches that ads. 3. Let us choose what ads system do we like of the above if we want to participate in that income system.
Matt. excuse for my grammar, i’m just trying to catch my mind and english is not my primary language.
i don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want ads on their site if there’s a potential to earn money therein…
so is there an option for ads now?
I had no idea that there was a possibility of an ad appearing on my blog. Other than the link to WordPress and the shameless promoting I often do for you on the blog.
It would be great to know what appears on our blogs without our knowledge. Especially since we’re providing the audience.
Why don’t you offer to share the proceeds, and the results, of the ads with the bloggers that don’t sign up? Might provide a different model.
It’s ok with me that there is very light advertisement going on. But how are we going to edit the advertisement design to complement our blog when we don’t even have a chance to see it?
Good stuff, thanks!
Sounds good. Never really noticed any ads, so whatever your ad algorithms are must work very well for users.
Wow, matt, it’s great and thanks.
PERFECT.
I might use this feature if my blogs populartiy grew.
Thats a great offer for 30 credits – but I want to run adsense in a subtle way too and I don’t see why I shouldn’t. But I really don’t want to see banners all over the place.
And then theres the ad-YouTube feature which actually sounds like it can be a ton of fun. Heck, WordPress could a whole load of ‘how to’ vids and get paid for it and us users would probably benefit without paying a penny.
Thanks for this feature.
I have never seen google ads on any of the wordpress.com blogs. This is pretty weird because I do at least 100 page views a day. Is there any project that will actually let publishers monetize their wordpress blogs?
sounds amazing, Waiting for it.
Wow that`s cool! But i don`t HAVE money to get it…but good job anyways!
Great idea. I don’t mind an occasional ad, but I can imagine some people do. I’m also glad you are so open about this and don’t force anything in people’s throats. I can’t say anything but good things about WordPress.com. Love the service!
I don’t mind the ads on my blog so much…I just wish I was allowed to advertise on my blog myself so I could make a little pocket change. I’m poor.
Very good idea, my friend, thanks
thanks for all, i love wp..
I’m new here, but think this is probably an upgrade worth paying for!
I don’t like this. I recently returned to wordpress ONLY because it’s got a cleaner look. And now you’re bringing in this ad thingy. If this ad problem gets out of hand, I’d definitely pack up and return to blogger.
This approach is great and smart!
wordpress rocks!
That is the best deal Matt……….Great. keep it up
If only this was real news to me. I prefer an allow-my-own-ads-upgrade. And even if I’m asking too much, wouldn’t it be real nice if there was a cost limit that came with it too, e.g:
1 ad=$0
2 ads=$5
3 ads=$10
You get the idea!