To off-set the costs of providing free hosting to millions of bloggers, WordPress.com has been running advertising on our free hosted blogs since 2006. Many bloggers do not know this, despite the fact they ticked the box required to get a free blog, because they did not read the ToS. Many also fail to read the advertising entry in the support documents after registering their username and blog(s). Continue reading
What’s the biggest risk facing Facebook? Hint: it may be in the palm of your hand. Half of the social network’s 845 million users now access the site through their cellphones, and that number is surging. Problem is Facebook currently receives virtually no display advertising revenue from small screens. The rapid shift to mobile Internet usage could be Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest threat – and he knows it. via Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.
At the Web 2.0 Summit today, Federated Media Publishing and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, announced an agreement to provide advertising rights for U.S. WordPress.com bloggers. Over 24 million sites are hosted on WordPress.com, and users will now be able to opt into a topically targeted advertising program. via Federated Media Offers Ad Rights for WordPress Bloggers.
I disabled my AdBlocker 3 weeks ago so I can witness ads. Here’s an example of what I see on the posts on the front page of a single blog > Ecopressed, Shaking Ads & Other Animated Ads
Will we experience an influx of opportunistic make money bloggers with low and no quality blog content polluting the blogging platform and community? Blogger has long been their home and the following article by another WordPress.com forum Volunteer I link to below contains a link to an excellent reference in that regard. Moreover, there’s indication of interest in this adverts scheme being posted into forum threads by people with usernames like click4us.
So, it looks like “high-end bloggers” based in the US will be the target for this program and, of course, this is an incentive for those same high traffic sites to stay on WordPress.com … Are advertising changes really coming to WordPress.com?
Perhaps we will find we prefer the old Google Adsense ads to these new animated, video and/or shaking ads. Only time will tell and in order to have our blogs shed of them we have to purchase No-Ads upgrades. WordPress.com benefits no matter whether or not we purchase the upgrade to get rid of the ads or we choose to put up with the ads.
WordPress.com has been running advertising on our free hosted blogs since 2006. Many bloggers do not know this because despite the fact they ticked the box required to get a free blog, they did not read the ToS. Many also do not read features page, or advertising entry in the support documents after registering their username and blog(s). Also note that as the ads do not display to us when we are logged in, and as many use browsers with ad blockers when logged out, they may not realize they are there at all. The only way to get rid of all advertising on our free hosted WordPress.com blogs is to purchase an annually renewable No-Ads upgrade.
Read also: WordPress.com Blogs Get More Advertising
Federated Media Publishing Partners with Automattic to Provide Exclusive Representation for WordPress.com Community of Independent Publishers – Federated Media Publishing, Lijit Networks and WordPress.com Trifecta Gives Brands Access to the Largest, Scalable Audience on the Independent Web
links to related forum threads
inappropriate ads
How to get rid of “poppressed”
strange things poping up
Unacceptable Spamming BY WordPress
The Other “Poppressed Ads” Problem – The Shock of Seeing Actual Ads
Discussion
Does anyone care to comment?
Related posts found in this blog:
WordPress.com bloggers are reporting “PopPressed”and “EcoPressed” advertising is now appearing at the end of their posts. It all began with FreshlyPressed which led to FoodPress which led to PopPressed and now EcoPressed. WordPress.com (Automattic) and Federated Media partnerships have been formed, and sites powered by WordPress.com aimed to redistribute content published on WordPress.com blogs and beyond are popping up all over. WordPress.com Partnerships: Popping Up All Over
I just started a wp.com class and for homework wrote 3 posts…rss feed, privacy settings are not open to SEO yet. I mean I am just starting.So it’s the luck of the draw. To date, I have somehow acquired “pop pressed” & “eco pressed” advertisements with thumbnail images which repeat across the bottom of all 3 posts. – Source
Scroll down the Features page to Advertising and you will see that WordPress occasionally runs Google Adsense and Skimlink advertising on our blogs to help pay for all the personnel, datacenters, servers and bandwidth required to host 15,000,000 blogs. Although they aren’t named in that page or in support documentaion I assume PopPressed and EcoPressed advertising is now part of the WordPress.com monetization scheme. If you don’t want the ads at the end of your posts you can purchase an annually renewable No-Ads upgrade ($29.97).
It’s an interesting scenario here at WordPress.com. Let’s look at the blogger’s side of the equation. There are many different types of blogs being free hosted at WordPress.com. In a nutshell free blogs from and being free hosted by wordpress.COM cannot be used to drive traffic to third-party sites by means of advertising and/or affiliate programs (see “Affiliate marketing blogs below for more clarity”). No blogger initiated advertising, retailing or reselling the work created or services provided by anyone other than yourself is allowed. E-commerce transactions cannot be conducted on WordPress.com blogs.
The only advertising exceptions are for high traffic free hosted blogs that qualify for and are accepted into the Ad Control program, and extremely high traffic blogs in the paid VIP hosting program.
The only exceptions with regard to affiliate links are found here:
Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (“Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). This includes multi-level marketing (MLM) blogs and pyramid schemes. To be clear, people writing their own original book, movie or game reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. Here is a thread in the support forums that talks more about which affiliate links are OK or not OK.
If you do require an ecommerce site, advertising and/or affiliate links on your blog, you can hire a web host and undertake setting up a self-hosted WordPress.org install or you can pay Staff for Guided Transfers to .org (Note: The theme you are using at WordPress.com will be installed and configured on the new site with the exception of premium themes. Premium themes purchased at WordPress.com are only valid here at WordPress.com.)
The cost of business blogging on a free hosted WordPress.com blog is paying for upgrades and/or a premium theme. Are you prepared to buy a domain, domain mapping, a theme and/or a CSS editing upgrade and a No-Ads upgrade and renew them all annually?
Updated with links to related forum threads
How to get rid of “poppressed”
strange things poping up
Unacceptable Spamming BY WordPress
The Other “Poppressed Ads” Problem – The Shock of Seeing Actual Ads
Placement of Ads on the Page
Almost a year ago now on April 28th, 2010, WordPress.com Editorial Czar, Joy Victory announced the introduction of Freshly Pressed and presented Five Ways to Get Featured on Freshly Pressed located on the front page of WordPress.com.
Each weekday, we select about ten new blog posts for the Freshly Pressed …
On November 1st, 2010, Joy Victory announced the introduction of FoodPress, a partnership with a publishing company called Federated Media. The Get Featured page reveals having your post featured on Foodpress is based on Five Ways to Get Featured on Freshly Pressed.
Each day, FoodPress features snippets of [food posts published on wordpress.com blogs] posts …
There was no announcement made on the offical WordPress.com community blog, but on March 3, 2011 PopPressed a new site powered by WordPress.com was launched. The information on site reveals it’s another partnership with Federated Media. And getting a post featured on PopPressed which focuses on style, sustainability, arts, and culture is based on Five Ways to Get Featured on Freshly Pressed. The site lacks an About page so I’m not clear if the featured content is limited to posts published on WordPress.com blogs or not.
There was no announcement made on the offical WordPress.com community blog when on March 8, 2011 a new site powered by WordPress.com called EcoPressed was launched. Unsurprisingly, the information on site reveals it’s yet another partnership with Federated Media. And the information on the Get Featured link is based on Five Ways to Get Featured on Freshly Pressed. However, the site is not limited to featuring only posts published on WordPress.com blogs.
Each weekday, we update EcoPressed with the latest and greatest posts from WordPress bloggers focusing on environmental topics like clean tech, renewable energy, and eco-friendly innovation, along with posts from other independent green thinkers from across the Web.
What these new pop-up partnership sites aim to do is drive traffic to blogs and presumably they make income from advertising sponsorships and/or affiliate schemes.
Given the new features for social networking that have been introduced, it feels like WordPress.com may be going in the direction of building a social networking site. In the WordPress.com Terms of Service we are told we own the copyright to our content, but do note that as justjennfer pointed out regarding the response to the introduction of the reblogging feature, we have no say in how our content is redistributed.
I’ve thought again and again about why the copyright issue of Like/Reblog hasn’t been addressed. Here’s why:
By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog.
Effectively this means that if you’ve signed up to blog on WP.com, you’ve signed away your right to control the redistribution of your content, copyright notice prominently placed on your blog or not. – Customer Dissatisfaction
1. Are the FoodPress, PopPressed and EcoPress sites being VIP hosted by WordPress.com?
If they are then they are allowed to run advertising and make an income from it and from affiliate schemes.
2. Are the FoodPress, PopPressed and EcoPress sites being free hosted by WordPress.com?
If they being free hosted by WordPress.com, and have they been accepted into the AdControl Program this enables them them to split advertising and affilate income with WordPress.com.
3. Aside from benefiting from an inflow of traffic that leads to bragging rights, and may result in new readers, an uncharacteristic inflow in traffic tends to produce a high bounce rate, so what else may the free hosted WordPress.com bloggers, who have their posts featured gain from the featuring?
4. There are many types of WordPress.com blogs. How many other Federated Media and WordPress.com (Automattic) partnerships are in the works?
Federated Media develops programs and products that help brands engage in those conversations and host their own dialogues with current and potential customers. As we’ve grown to have offices across North America and represent a larger number of partners, that basic principle continues to describe our business. See also > Marketers
Moments ago, our partner John Battelle and the team at Federated Media launched the beta of ExecTweets, a new service for folks to find and follow business execs on Twitter. It’s an interesting model, essentially a lens on Twitter that’s further organized by specific industry, like tech, media, healthcare, etc. — Federated Media launches ExecTweets
I’m wondering how many of my readers have had their posts featured on FoodPress, or PopPressed or Ecopressed and would appreciate hearing feedback from those whose posts have been featured. I don’t know what to think. I’m wondering what my readers think about these partnerships with Federated Media that have led to WordPress.com popping up all over.
Updated with links to related forum threads
How to get rid of “poppressed”
strange things poping up
Unacceptable Spamming BY WordPress
The Other “Poppressed Ads” Problem – The Shock of Seeing Actual Ads
I’ve been tentatively exploring various affiliate marketing options for my personal development blog. My thinking was that I might be able to make enough income as an affiliate marketer to be able to attend conferences and workshops that would help me improve my blogging and social networking skills and my blog content.
Affiliate Marketing is another term for CPA (Cost per Action) Advertising. This is a form of advertising where the advertiser pays based on specified actions taken by the end user. Some examples would be filling out a form after clicking on the ad or purchasing a product after clicking on the ad.
Affiliate programs are revenue sharing arrangements set up by companies selling products and services. As a web site owner, one is paid a commission for sending customers to the company. Provided your blog has high enough traffic and the targeted audience for the products and services being offered , one can make income from affiliate programs based on a percentage for each sale.
My starting point was reading Karen Cotton’s brief ehow article titled How to choose the best affiliate programs. I then read 32 other articles and along the way discovered that products that relieve joint pain, back pain, or migraine pain, self help books and programs, and those aimed at improving relationships are among the favorites in the personal development blogs niche.
First and foremost to achieve success in affiliate marketing you need to be knowlwedgeable about your product/service and be able to promote in the right way, at the right time, to the right audience. There are two approaches an affiliate marketer can take when it comes to choosing an affiliate product/service to market. The first approach is to choose to promote a product/service that’s currently in great demand and may sell quickly. The second approach is to choose a product/service that you use yourself and can vouch for. I decided that the second approach was the way to go as I believe it would be far easier to market a product/service that one is already familiar with and sold on.
I read all the common sense advice regarding selecting an affiliate program that has
I learned about affiliate software – software that, at a minimum, provides tracking and reporting of commission-triggering actions (sales, registrations, or clicks) from affiliate links. And I also learned about two tier affiliate programs – affiliate program structure whereby affiliates earn commissions on their conversions as well as conversions of webmasters they refer to the program.
There is a distinction between fraud and unethical activity and I wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t get burned by either type of activity. So while researching I typed “affiliate fraud” into Google and the SERPs produced an infographic. I’m not posting it here as it’s oversized for my blog. The infographic was produced by Ace Affiliates and they provide reviews in the categories of credit cards, health, insurance, dating, retail, and web hosting.
Ace Affiliates is in the business of reviewing affiliate marketing programs so that publishers can make an informed decision about which affiliate program to join. We are a resource for all webmasters, from the relatively inexperienced individual who simply wants to know how to make money online to the experienced affiliate marketer who wants relevant reviews all in one place.
These are the risks identified by by Ace Affiliates:
1. Duplicating – creating a clone of a legitimate site.
2. Spamming – sending mass emails under the guise of a legtimate brand.
3. Squatting – creating a site under a common misspelling of a legitimate site.
4. Diverting – creating deceptive links that do not pay the intended affiliate.
5. Faking – creating the illusion of many clicks on an affiliate link to drive up earning on a CPC program.
6. Stealing – making purchases on a stolen credit card to earn bogus commissions or drain a merchant’s coffers.These are the solutions identified by by Ace Affiliates:
1. Forums – Join a forum that shares information on fraudsters.
2. Communicate – Talk with affiliates about their business and tactics.
3. Blacklist – Maintain your own list of fraudsters.
4. Tracking – Use cookies that identify fraud by tracking IPs.
5. Checking – Thoroughly check affiliate’s sites.
6. Approve – Avoid automated approvals when addining addiliates.
Source: Affiliate Fraud: The Risks and The Solutions
See also: 5 Examples of Affiliate Program Scams
The information found at these links below will express the limitations with regard to advertising and affiliate progams re: WordPress.com blogs. WordPress.com blogs cannot be used to drive traffic to third party sites (TOS section 2, 5th bullet down) http://en.wordpress.com/tos/
Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (“Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). This includes multi-level marketing (MLM) blogs and pyramid schemes. To be clear, people writing their own original book, movie or game reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. http://wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/
The Domain Mapping Upgrade does not enable the permission to use advertising, any kind of prohibited code, or upload additional themes and plugins. With the upgrade, your blog will still be hosted here at WordPress.com, which means that you will not have FTP access to your files and must still abide by our Terms of Service accordingly. http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/
I’m undecided about whether or not I want to pursue affiliate marketing. I was turned off by the number of pop-up advertisments I experienced and by the appearance of the sites I visited. The only affiliate marketing program I have any interest in at this point is Amazon books.
As an Amazon affiliate you earn up to 10 % in commission for each sale you generate (normal commission is 8.5 %). Members of the Amazon book affiliate program get access to Associates Central – Amazon’s extranet for associates. Here you can build your links and see your traffic and earning reports. You will also get the latest news and find out about new opportunities available through the program.
1. Are you currently involved in an affiliate marketing program? If so, would you recommend it to others?
2. Have you ever been burned in an affiliate marketing program? If so, what happened to you?
3. Are you interested in affiliate marketing and if so, what kind of products/services would you be interested in marketing?
Twenty income streams for bloggers
How to make money by blogging
Top 5 Myths About Google Adsense
by Guest Blogger, Brad from canadiantechblogger.com
Myth 1: It will make you a millionaire.
There is general belief that putting up Google Adsense ads will make us able to leave our jobs, and be millionaires. Continue reading
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 Continue reading
money
We’ve all heard the hype about making millions with our blogs but the fact remains that very few bloggers have the degree of expertise required to produce content that brings in the massive number of hits on advertisements that are required to make a living from blogging.
The make money blogging niche is the largest niche of all. The competition for readers is fierce and most traffic flows to the A and B list make money bloggers. Other bloggers within the niche tend to re-blog the content produced by the front runners, rather than creating unique content, and that has a negative effect on the niche as a whole, as readers become savvy to this.
The truth is that there are no shortcuts to making money from blogging. You need to have a knowledge base and skill sets that make it possible for you to “deliver the goods”.
You must:
If you do all these things listed above, you will create a blog that’s worth monetizing. Then you will be ready to consider when and how to purchase your own domain.
Regarding the “no advertising” policy on wordpress.com blogs:
(1) Blogger initiated advertising is not allowed on wordpress.com blogs – wordpress.com is already running adsense on our blogs and, on the global tag pages and Google allows only one adsense account to run on a blog/website at a time. The only exception is VIP hosted accounts ($600 for set-up and $300. hosting fee per month).
http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/09/06/on-ads/
http://faq.wordpress.com/2005/12/08/adsense/
(2) The volunteers answering questions on the forum are your fellow bloggers. They are not staff and do not have any role to play in the formulation of Automattic’s corporate policy for wordpress.com. If you wish to contact staff – WordPress.com support hours are Mondays – Fridays from 8 AM – 4PM (Pacific) and there’s a “support” button on the top right hand corner of any admin side blog page that you can use.
P.S. You can also scroll down to the very bottom of the Features page and look for “Advertising” for more information.
If you are campaigning for blogger initiated adsense on wordpress.com blogs, then please use your common sense.
Google does not allow two adsense accounts to run on the same blog or website at the same point in time. WordPress.com is already running Google adsense ads. Read Matt’s February wrap-up to determine how many wp.com blogs there actually are and then guesstimate what a loss that would be to wordpress.com.
Best wishes for happy blogging. 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
Update: September 18th, 2008. If you are willing to shell out 30 credits per year for an upgrade then the long awaited option of having an ad-free worpress.com blog has just been announced.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Will there ever be ads allowed on wordpress.com blogs?”
It’s a question that is frequently posted to the wp.com forum and, it’s often posted on weekends when staff are scarcely seen. It’s usually posted by a blogger, who has not located the FAQs and is not aware of the following:
(1) blogger initiated advertising is not allowed on wordpress.com blogs;
(2) the only exceptions made are for VIP bloggers;
(3) wordpress.com is already running adsense on our blogs and, on the global tag pages.
Most importantly, it’s a question that volunteers answering forum questions do not have the answer to. The volunteers answering questions on the forum are your fellow bloggers. They, of course, do not have any role to play in the formulation of Auttomattic’s corporate policy for wordpress.com and, they are not any more in the know about corporate policy development than the bloggers posting such questions are.
WordPress.com support hours are Mondays – Fridays from 8 AM – 4PM (Pacific)
There is a blue “support” button that you can click on the top right hand corner of any admin side blog page in your wp.com blog during support hours and to put your question to them. But, don’t hold your breath while waiting for a reply.
I think we can intuit that any IT corporation with over 1 million users is not going to leak information about a new policy to one blogger at a time. It seems more reasonable to assume that news of such a change will be made by way of a public announcement delivered by Automattic’s management.
Self-hosting
It also seems reasonable that if you are a blogger who wishes to have a monetized blog, that you will be better served by hiring a web host (it’s not expensive) and downloading the free software from wordpress.org.
At the very top of the forum there is a sticky post titled “wordpress.com and wordpress.org: the difference”. There is also another entry in the FAQs
And, if you scroll to the very bottom of the Feature page I have linked to and look for “Advertising”.
Reference: Types of Blogs
Related posts:
Adsense and Ads Off Upgrades
Planning to Self-Host Your Blog
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
