Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A
You can do all of this and more from a WordPress.org blog, and many very profitable sites do
just that.
This is not such a big issue for many people when they first start out. You probably need some time
to build traffic before you can, to use that awful word, monetize it. The issue, though, is that you
can never do these things from a WordPress.com blog. (Automattic might adjust the anticommerce
policies in effect for WordPress.com at some point, but it's unlikely to reverse them completely.)
If you ever want to make money from your blog—or ever think you might—choosing WordPress.com
is not only just deferring the day you have to deal with WordPress.org, it's also allowing you to
build up traffic to the WordPress.com site—then be faced with the hassle of trying to take that traf-
fic with you to the WordPress.org site. This is an effort that is unlikely to be completely successful,
however hard you try.
There are more subtle money-related issues as well. By using WordPress.com, you learn only a sub-
set of what “full” WordPress—and the universe of software changes, themes, and plug-ins that are
only available with WordPress.org—can do. Your blog will be worse than it could be, and you'll be
trying to learn all the new stuff and revise your blog to take advantage of it, just when your busi-
ness is starting to take off—a time when you might actually have other things you'd rather be
doing.
It's bad enough that WordPress.com prevents you from making money; if WordPress.com sites were
some kind of ad-free, commerce-free zone, it might even be acceptable for most people. Depending
on the topic of your blog, that's hardly the case, though.
Automattic's Ads on Your Site
Automattic puts ads on your WordPress.com site—the very Google
AdSense ads that you would no doubt love to have on your site
yourself, if you could.
The problem is not so much your lost revenue (see this section's
Tip for details). It's the infuriating thought of random ads being
plastered on your site.
Not only do you not control the ads, but you're also not notified of
them and, in what would be a classic good news/bad news joke if
it weren't so unfunny, you never get to see them. WordPress users
never see ads on WordPress.com sites, so you have no way of
knowing how many, if any, ads your non-WordPress-user site visi-
tors are seeing, nor even what a WordPress blog ad looks like.
(See Chapter 10, “Adding Upgrades, Audio, and Video,” for an
example.)
No one knows the frequency with which these ads run. Automattic
isn't saying, and comments on the topic are all over the map.
Many people find this objectionable enough to either use
WordPress.org over WordPress.com, on this ground alone, or to pay
for the WordPress.com No-Ads upgrade (see Chapter 10). However,
tip
Making revenues of a penny
per pageview from Google
AdSense ads or similar ads is
pretty good money for a
blogging site. A few cents per
pageview is truly excellent,
and probably only possible if
your blog is about something
very popular that sells online
for good money, such as
computer hardware or cell
phones.
With this in mind, unless
your blog has many thou-
sands of pageviews, you're
not losing much moolah by
not being able to run your
own AdSense ads. At a penny
per pageview, it would take
10,000 pageviews for you to
make $100—and much more
for you to make much more.
