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    WordPress.com Introduces WordAds: “You Deserve Better Than AdSense”

    Robin Wauters

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    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
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    Automattic has teamed up with Federated Media to – finally – allow WordPress.com bloggers to make money from online advertising. The project is called WordAds and if you’re on WordPress.com you can express your interest for the program here.

    From the WordPress.com blog, including a fair bit of snark directed at Google:

    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 than AdSense.

    WordAds, which is optional, will let bloggers make money from their blogs by showing “high quality ads from brand advertisers” – this is where Federated Media will come in.

    Note that not every WordPress.com blog will be eligible for the program. According to the sign-up page, only publicly visible blogs with custom domains will be considered. Furthermore, selection will be based on “level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog”.

    Automattic’s Jon Burke also threw out an interesting stat in the blog post: apparently, more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs come online on a daily basis.


    Crunchbase

    Product: WordPress.com
    Website: wordpress.com
    Company Automattic

    WordPress.com offers a popular and free blogging platform which competes with Google’s Blogger and Six Apart’s TypePad. WordPress.com is a version of the open-source WordPress package hosted and maintained by Automattic. TechCrunch, Giga Omni Media and other prominent technology blog networks use WordPress.com’s VIP program.

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    Company: Automattic
    Website: automattic.com
    Launch Date: July 1, 2005
    Funding: $30.6M

    Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, the simplest, most secure way to start web-publishing immediately on the open source WordPress platform. They also make Jetpack for WordPress, which bundles a number of social improvements to the WordPress core software as a single plugin. Automattic offers a number of products, like VaultPress and Akismet, on a freemium model so anyone can use them for free, and later have the choice to pay extra for premium features. Automattic has over 150 employees, including...

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