One month of WordAds: $5.26

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As an experiment, I’ve been running WordAds on this blog for one month, and managed to earn a stonking $5.26.

WordAds earnings for April

In April the site had 9,744 views (average of 325 per day). May got off to a stronger start, with 2,570 views already (average: 428 per day), so between April 5th and May 5th I’ve had around 10,000 views. WordPress don’t give me any details about impressions, clickthroughs or any of that stuff, but I think it’s fairly standard practice for ad networks to keep site owners in the dark.

So it seems pretty clear that I should remove these WordAds. They are far from subtle, and they have been implemented in such a way that my theme has broken in a lot of little ways.

However, I’m not so sure I want to. $5 isn’t worth uglifying my site, but the alternative is to have adverts anyway and earn zero revenue from them. And as I complained in a big post last year, the adverts on WordPress.com sites can be shockingly bad quality.

Four adverts found on my WordPress.com blog

For now I think I’ll keep the WordAds (assuming they want to keep me).

Update 2012.10.06

This post is semi-popular, so I thought I’d update it. So far I have earned a whopping $27.35. I’m pretty consistent in ‘earning’ just over $5 every month.

Period Earnings
2012-04 $5.26
2012-05 $5.89
2012-06 $5.38
2012-07 $5.21
2012-08 $5.60

Previously on Halfblog.net

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45 thoughts on “One month of WordAds: $5.26”

  2. Are you still on wordpress.com? If you moved to .org you’d most likely make more from AdSense, they’d be targeted better to your content and could be styled to fit your theme. On my site I’d expect to get £5+ for 10,000 page views. Not masses more, but still better than $5. Or you could go ad-free and make it all look cleaner.

    • I’m quite happy on WP.com for now. I’m not looking to make money. In fact, if I manage to earn $100, I’ll probably spend it on removing ads and getting CSS access here.

  3. Hi Foomandoonian,

    Thanks for the @CardiffInternet Twitter follow. You know, there might be just be other ways to monetise your blog. As you might know, we run a monthly event and discuss topics like this

    Are you planning to join us on Monday 14 May 2012 in Cardiff Bay? http://bit.ly/CardiffIM

  4. Hello, would you recommend WordAds? Does it cause any dramatic changes to your blog theme and is there a way to pause the ads if we do not wish to have them on for a particular period of time? I’m just wondering if it’s all worth it.

    • I don’t know if I recommend WordAds. I am using them!

      WordAds weren’t integrated into my theme as well as I would have hoped. You can see a list of problems in my support forum thread. (They still haven’t fixed the most recent problem.)

      And yes, there is an option to pause WordAds. You can also choose not to display them to logged-in WP.com users.

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  7. Reblogged this on theesposito and commented:
    For fellow bloggers and others interested in starting a new blog, halfblog.net has posted a screenshot of their earnings and some of their stats to help assist your WordAds venture. They have a much more popular blog than The Esposito, and hasn’t earned much. Yikes.

  8. My second month was more profitable! $5.89. At this rate I’ll be able to withdraw my first payment of $100 in around 18 months.

  9. My site view for Sept was 255,817 , my highest view was 147,670 on a day, and my earning was only 25.58. Does not make sense. Are we taken for a ride?. Really disheartening..

    • It’s 2 years apart so things may have changed, but your views don’t mean much. What you want to pay attention to is the ad impressions.

      A variety of factors will affect your earnings. Country the viewer is from (America being highest-paying), whether they are using ad-blockers/no-script (so they don’t see the ads) and whether they view the ads in full.

      Say you have an ad-box at the bottom of your post. If a person views your article but the ad-box isn’t shown in its entirety on their screen, it isn’t counted as an ad impression. This can occur – say – if you have an article, a viewer views it, gets to the end, sees the top-half of an ad-box but instead of scrolling down to visit some other links or post a comment, they click on your sidebar to go somewhere else. Since they only saw half the ad-box, it isn’t counted as an ad impression.

      I get slightly under 100k ad impressions (a lot more views of course) and make around $230-250 per month from one of my blogs.

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  11. It’s worth noting that where you live makes a huge difference. Participants in WordAds in countries other than the United States are missing out, because FM (Federated Media) works largely with advertisers in the United States.

    There are different types of ads layouts that WordPress can assign your blog, too. And, they categorize your blog to help produce (somewhat) relevant advertising on your website. BLEK.CO, for example, is receiving the 3-ad “optimized” option. Some blogs only show one or two WordAds ads. And yes, WordPress themes and whether or not you’re utilizing your sidebars make a huge difference.

    Some of you are claiming hundreds of thousands of page views a day, with very small WordAds payouts. This is surprising compared to my results. In June 2012, for example, BLEK received 68,562 page views for the ENTIRE MONTH, and received a WordAds payout of $80.33. Not bad at all.

    There is really no one-size-fits-all approach to estimating different sites’ payouts.

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  13. I was getting very low $0.38 with 3800 view only, lol :-P But Nov 2012 month i got $9 for 3900 views only. I am confused how they are paying and what about impressions. Can anyone suggest me by checking my site, what can i improve on it?

    Rahul
    http://linuxexplore.com

  14. How long did it take to receive your first payment. Today is 01/03/2013 and it is still very unclear as to when and how much I will get paid.

    • I never received any payment. After 7 months I decided to remove WordAds and instead paid WordPress.com to remove all ads from my blog.

      In total ad impressions earned me $41.11, not meeting the minimum threshold for paying out. I asked WP support if they could contribute those earnings towards AdFree, but that wasn’t possible.

      I’m not happy, but I’m also not that angry. It’s nice not having ads on my blog. I do wish I had turned the word-ads back on for the week when thousands of visitors hit my blog though!

      • I have been receiving payments over the last few months, between February and now.

        I have received around $700 for 2,600,000 hits – the figures WordAds give you vary completely to the amount of hits WordPress claim you have received.

        I can only put it down to adblockers and the fact that the advert won’t load each and every time the website loads.

        I have found the more hits you receive, the less WordAds pay you for each impression, it has been ranging from $0.01 – $0.03 per impression.

        They are in control of how much you get paid, they make the offer – essentially, you take it or leave it. It’s easy to make money with them, impossible to make any REAL money.

  15. I’m interested in applying for Wordads as WordPress are already popping ads onto my site. Great to hear you have already made a decision. Do you know if our wordpess users are able to become an afflicated customer to Amazon and earn that way?

    • That’s a good question. I’ve not tried Amazon affiliate links here, nor am I certain what their policy is. I wouldn’t be surprised if WP.com terms of service forbid it.

      • They actually don’t care as long as it’s something like a link for the basis of a review or something. It’s hard to use since wordpress blocks their code,but you can post a pic with a URL link or something.

  16. That seems a rather low earning. I was very positive since WordPress even claimed Google Adsense to be a ‘sad’ advertising platform. But now I’m pretty sure I’d only make a few worthless cents with WordAds not to mention the strict requirements to join WordAds is for you to be on WordPress.com and have your own domain mapped to it (another 18$/ year upgrade), on top of that your payment option is just PayPal!
    I’ve used Adsense in the past and haven’t been too much happy with them either mostly because of their strict policies but I can surely say comparing WordAds to Adsense is like a joke. Adsense earns you a lot more per traffic you get and they have lots of payment options plus they do accept sub-domain sites and blogs (so you need no investment).

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  20. Word ads got off to a shaky start, but I’m finally almost at $100 dollars after one year, it seems like it has got better,as I got $20.00 last month. Hopefully it stays that way!

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  24. Just a quick addendum to this, from another Cardiff blogger, if anyone’s still reading these comments – the ads displayed, and the amount you get paid per impression, vary depending on where the reader is located, not the blog.

    If you have loads of American readers, as I do (as a result of my topic), then not only do US viewers apparently get served more big-budget/brand ads than the “Five Ways to Cut Belly Fat” type nonsense we see, they seem to be worth a ridiculous amount more than British or European ones – it varies but generally I get in the region of $1 per 500 views.

    • This post actually does get a bit of continuing attention. I’m thinking of putting a disclaimer at the top pointing out how old this post is and emphasising that it’s just a single data point.

    • Pretty much this^. One of my blogs has a heavy presence in North America (60%+ of views) and I’m getting – consistently – $2.3-$2.5 per 1k ad impressions.

      Unfortunately thanks to ad-blocking addons only about 50% of the views translates into ad impressions. After taking into account the 2-3 ad placements per page, I’m guessing only about 30% or less of my regular visitors don’t have ad-blocker up.

      My blog (not on this account) is based on tech though so it’s understandable that most of them would use ad-blocker. My guess is if you did a block about retirement planning or gardening, you’ll have a much higher ad impression per view.

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  28. Hi Geoff.

    I just got approved for WordAds and I saw your helpful post while I was looking for more information on it. I hope it’s alright with you that I linked your entry on my own post.

    Cheers,

  29. Great post! I was wondering if you knew what the minimum number of views you have to get is in order to be accepted for WordAds? Thanks!

    • From past research on forums and other blogs, and from my own experience, it’s about 10k views per month. There’s probably some kind of visitor requirement as well.

      One of my blogs I started about a year ago – got approved in the same month that it hit 10k views so it sounds about right. There’s probably other factors (like % of viewership in America or no. of visitors compared to views/etc and maybe even topic (so random spam won’t work out)) but that’s my experience.

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