Has anyone applied to Wordads yet? Wordpress.com has strong words for AdSense, calling it ‘sad’. Makes me wonder if they have something that’llsteal all AdSense publishers?
It certainly won’t steal all AdSense publishers as it will be only for a relative elite of Wordpress.com bloggers - those with their own domains and decent traffic I would imagine. It is a great move from both Wordpress and FM, and should be good for publishers on WP.com - but I very much doubt it will be game-changing.
I imagine it will do very well for those that can take part as Federated Media is renowned for having a great sales team, and the WordAds move would just extend their reach for advertisers. That said, the fill rate will not be like that of AdSense, and you are going to need notably more than the <1000/month pageviews that the vast majority of blogs get.
So not for self-hosted Wordpress bloggers?
Nope. To quote WordAds lead Jon Burke:
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