WordAds: Advertise on WordPress

We’ve all heard of WordPress, the blogging platform. We’ve also all heard of Google AdSense. Yes, that’s where Google makes a sizeable chunk of money. Although WordPress is among the most popular blogging platform online, Google controls over half of the online marketing space. So what happens, when WordPress decides to launch its own ad delivery network?

 

In a recent blog post, Jon Burke, Ads Lead at Automattic and WordPress.com said, “Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and 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.”

 

With this announcement, WordPress claims to better what Google achieved, at least in the blogging sphere. All of that seems encouraging, however, it does come with its catch. WordAds will work only with WordPress.com blogs. So all users who continue to run self hosted blogs would continue with their Google Ad plugins for now.

 

Earlier this year, it was reported that WordPress got into a deal with Federated Media, which would give access to 25 million WordPress.com blogs. Although this isn’t a significant figure for Google, it certainly is a trend we would be following. We wonder whether Google would offer special deals to bloggers, or several other companies would emerge in this fast growing space. Along similar lines, Adobe has a significant unit focussing its resources heavily on analytics (Omniture, from its Digital Marketing unit) and ad delivery mechanisms as well.  Certainly a lot expected from this space in 2012.