Today, a new section was added to the wordpress.com support documentation entry for Advertising:
3. We are testing a feature called Ad Control that lets WordPress.com bloggers with a lot of traffic and appropriate content turn on AdSense for their blog and split the resulting revenues 50/50 with us. If you’d like to apply to try Ad Control and you get over 50k page views per month, please email ad-control@wordpress.com
Hmmm … there’s not a whole lot new here for most wordpress.com bloggers. VIP hosted blogs, which garner that many monthly hits and even more have been able to run Adsense on their blogs for two or more years now.
Content guidelines: Publishers may not place AdSense code on pages with content that violates any of our content guidelines. Some examples include content that is adult, violent or advocating racial intolerance.
Related posts found in this blog:
Adsense click fraud is a fools’ game
Play it again, Sam: No Adsense, No Advertising
Adsense
Adsense and Ads Off Upgrades
Vikas Gupta
January 15, 2010
50k page views per month!!
It is aptly titled: ad control!
I guess you are the first one to notice the change. :)
I will inform Nita; maybe she will use it (she has stopped blogging on that blog now).
timethief
January 15, 2010
@Vikas
We are peas in a pod. I thought the very same thing! Ad Control You make me belly laugh. I don’t think there’s an emoticon for that. Anyway back to subject at hand, I have been here for 4 years and I am confident that wordpress.com Staff and Management will not create a Blogger (blogspot) scammers, spammers, plagiarists, and blog scrapers haven here.
I’m missing Nita in a big way. She is a writer and blogger extraordinaire’. :(
It’s always good to hear from you so thanks for commenting. :)
VIKAS |vikas-gupta.in
January 15, 2010
Nita has big plans for her new blog http://palmistryforyou.com
I think they can create an ad-friendly environment here without creating a haven for the spammers!
timethief
January 15, 2010
Nita’s new palmistryforyou blog is fascinating. We already are an ad friendly and controlled blog environment. :)
dreamsburnred
January 15, 2010
Great that wordpress is finally testing :).
50k pageviews is pretty high though.
timethief
January 15, 2010
I wonder how many blogs with content that meets the Content policies and garners more than 50K page views per month there are at wordpress.com, not counting those that are VIP hosted, and how many will apply for AdControl?
dreamsburnred
January 15, 2010
Not enough which would pretty much label it under beta testing.
Tech Crunch is hosting on wordpress.com, and the apple blog but they are VIP so there a no show.
whatsonmypc.wordpress.com has 215k blog stats but it’s been around for quite some time.
Staff will post the results of this testing I am sure :).
timethief
January 15, 2010
It’s been two years since the little blurb was added on the bottom of the Features page:
“Advertising – To support the service we may occasionally show Google text ads on your blog, however we do this very rarely. You can remove ads from your blog for a low yearly fee. In the future you’ll be able to show your own ads and make money from your blog. “
Keith
January 15, 2010
If you get 50k views, would you still be on a WP.com site? I would hope not anyway…
timethief
January 15, 2010
If my blog was getting more than 50K visitors monthly I would be looking into VIP hosting.
Nita
January 16, 2010
Hey, you guys are embarrassing me with all that praise! :)
This adsense thing is a real surprise for me. I get far more than 50,000 views per month (although it will stop now that I have stopped blogging on the wide angle view blog) but VIP is out of the question for me as 500 dollars a month is a shocking figure! That too with one-time setup fee of $1,500 per blog! I mean hey, we earn in rupees and there is no way any one of us can such a chance. I cannot imagine earning more than that in ad revenue. In any case, I would never pay such a high fee.
As for adsense, there is no point now as I have shut my blog, but even then I doubt whether I will earn much. Therefore that is not a temptation for me.
Even on my palmistry blog when I put up adsense, I do not expect any huge ad revenue. Now or in the future. That blog is a kind of help to me in my real life business. Nothing like a blog to promote one’s skills.
My wide angle india blog did get me freelance work, but most of it paid a pittance! Magazines and newspapers in India pay freelancers very badly!
Anyway, sorry to hog so much of your space TT. I have been on a sort of hiatus for awhile and not been reading blogs. But that is one activity of mine which will not stop. You will see me here and there!! :)
VIKAS |vikas-gupta.in
January 16, 2010
Nita, you can still open the blog and invite guest posts on it from trusted bloggers.
And if you put AdSense on your palmistry blog, it may compete with your own blog!
timethief
January 16, 2010
Hello Nita,
It’s good to hear from you. Thanks for your contribution to this thread. What I found is that within an hour of announcing I would not be posting to the first blog I had (environmental – top 15,000 at Technorati – PR5) the entire blog contents had been scraped. The blog itself had been claimed by another blogger I did not know at some social network sites and many of the posts I had written were plagiarized and popping up in other blogs. I went after every on of the scum who stole from me and got my content removed from their splogs and also from the social networks they had registered my blog on. Then without notice I made the blog “private”. Money was the motivator as each and everyone of those who stole my content and posted on splogs covered with advertising.
P.S. I think Vikas has a good idea about guest writer for your wide angle view of India blog.
Mark Stoneman
January 17, 2010
I was wondering why a WordPress.com blog I saw today looked like a Blogger blog with excessive advertising in it. Mystery solved.
VIKAS |vikas-gupta.in
January 17, 2010
Mark,
Give us the blog address if possible. I want to see a sample. Thanks.
timethief
January 17, 2010
Hi Mark,
It’s good to see your username. :)
Leif Andersen
January 19, 2010
All of you are talking about the 50k views needed, while that’s a lot, I would like to point out the clause “split the resulting revenues 50/50 with us”, while I have nothing against this (after all, Automattic has to put food on the table too), it makes me laugh, adsense results in so little money anyway, and now that’s going to be cut in half, it makes me giggle. Then again, if your getting 50k views a day, and not paying for hosting, I still think that Automattic is getting the short side of the stick.
Link Discover
January 28, 2010
This is a nice post… is usefull for my site! nice job.
timethief
January 28, 2010
@linkfarmer
I removed your spammy link to your blogspot linkfarm from your insincere comment.
dreamsburnred
January 28, 2010
If you still have the blogspot url you can report it to blogspot…
timethief
January 28, 2010
Yes, indeed.
davincicrib
February 14, 2010
50k page views! If I had that much traffic I wouldn’t be splitting it 50/50, I’d go pay for hosting!
timethief
February 14, 2010
Well, there you have it. The way to keep the spammers, scammers and sploggers out of wordpress.com is to require that applicants have 50 K page views and that’s probably why the program is called AdControl. ;)