Collect ad earnings

This guide explains how to check your site’s WordAds revenue, earnings payouts, and ad payment history.

To find out how much you have earned from ads, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Jetpack → Monetize.
3. Click the “View Ad Dashboard” button.
4. Click the “Earnings” tab.

Here, you can view:

• Total Earnings: How much revenue in USD has been earned while you’ve been enrolled in WordAds.
• Total Paid: Total earnings paid to you while enrolled in WordAds.
• Outstanding Amount: How much in earnings have yet to be paid out.

Earnings are recorded per impression (when the ad is seen by a visitor), not by click. That means the more visits your website receives and the more visitors browse your site, the more you’ll earn.

To earn meaningful revenue from ads, a site generally needs tens of thousands of ad impressions. Below that level, a site will receive revenue of just a few cents or nothing at all. If you’re just getting started with a new website, or your site does not receive high enough traffic consistently, we recommend focusing on growing your audience before activating ads.

Advertising rates fluctuate constantly. The online ad system is similar to the stock market, where advertisers bid in real time. Therefore, it’s normal to see different earning amounts each week, month, year, and for each site you run ads on. Earnings are affected by many factors, including:

• The amount of traffic your site receives.
• Where the majority of the traffic is coming from (North American ad placements pay out at a much higher level than ads from other regions.)
• How much advertisers value your visitors based on their cookies.
• How many visitors are using ad blockers.
• The actual ads that are displayed.

Earnings are paid out once the outstanding amount exceeds US$100. If you earned less than US$100 in a given month, your earnings will carry over to the next month instead.

Payments are made to the PayPal account you have saved in your ad settings.

Estimated earnings are updated daily. Finalized earnings are posted at the end of the month following the one in which they were earned. For example, earnings made in January will be issued by the end of February.

If you are closing your WordPress.com account or withdrawing from WordAds and have an outstanding amount that is less than US$100, please contact support and we can pay out the remainder of your balance. This option is only available if you no longer wish to use WordAds — you won’t be able to reactivate WordAds on the same site again once you withdraw. If you are taking a break, we suggest “pausing” ads instead by turning off ads in your ad settings.

In the Payments tab, you will find:

• Payment details for previous payouts.
• Estimated payment date for pending payments.
• Any errors that result in us being unable to pay your earnings, such as an incorrect email address.

The more visitors your site receives, the more you earn from ads. Therefore, the single best thing you can do to increase your earnings is to focus on growing your site’s traffic. Advertisers are primarily focused on who your audience is, not what they are reading. So, a knitting site can earn as much as a site about software.

Here are additional tips to earn more from ads:

1. Ensure that you have a Consent Management Provider (CMP) for collecting consent to display personalized ads to visitors from the European region.
2. Don’t overdo it with ads—the default ad placements are usually enough. Inserting too many extra ad spaces on your site can negatively impact your earnings.
3. Create content around topics you think will drive more visits, especially in the North American region, where advertisers typically pay out the highest rates.
4. Do not publish content that does not adhere to our brand safety guidelines, as defined in the Ads terms of service.
5. [Plugin-enabled sites only] Ensure that the ads.txt file is up to date in your WordAds settings, and not managed via a plugin.