As we grow, we really do value the feedback that we hear from all of our WordAds users. It helps us to improve the service in a way that benefits all of you.

sarynthra, it sounds like the WordAds program is no longer a good fit for you. You are welcome to turn off WordAds at any time via Settings -> WordAds in your blog's Dashboard.

If you still desire advertising but no longer wish to be part of the WordAds program, you might be interested in a self-hosted (WordPress.org) installation. There are no restrictions on advertising if you setup a self-hosted WordPress.org blog instead of a WordPress.com blog, but there are added responsibilities.

Please see this link to learn about the differences:
http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

We have hosting recommendations at the following link if you are interested:
http://get.wp.com/hosting/

Also, thank you timethief for volunteering your time to help here. It is greatly appreciated!

How dare you speak down to us about not understanding what wordads is, 95% of this board is people starting a wordpress blog to make money because of the BS you have fed us, and only now are we truly seeing how we were "played".

I am only saying all this because I make a fair amount of money elsewhere online and I don't care about being blocked or whatever you do to keep people from seeing the truth.

We need double or triple ads on ALL BLOGS to actually see decent income. (also timethief, quit being so condescending, people already know the links you post so just stop while you are ahead, you barely help from what I have seen.)

Hopefully some rich SOB who works for WordPress can respond LIKE WE ARE HUMANS soon.

If you have any further questions about what is WordAds or your specific earnings please don't hesitate to get in touch with me at support@wordpress.com. Jon

Do you think it's reasonable that you need millions of hits to get a meaningful payout? It's nonsense. Just because it's the way the industry works doesn't mean it's healthy or sustainable.

And the vast majority of those 16,000+ hits were from the US. 23 cents.

WordAds is a group of engineers, UI designers and finance people who serve as a conduit between you and advertisers. We have some influence on ad rates. Because WordPress.com is a top 10 global Internet site we can negotiate better terms with advertisers than a small site. But no company is big enough to demand much higher prices for Internet ad inventory. Most of the work we do is technical which allows us to test and run ads from a great variety of partners.

Most often sites that complain about poor pricing get most of their visits from countries like India, Malaysia, Indonesia or other countries where advertising is inexpensive. We simply can't force advertisers to pay much more for something that they don't value. Even in North America there is a limit to how much we can demand from ads. Sites like Facebook serve billions of ads per day and advertisers can buy that fairly inexpensively. There is no shortage of places where advertisers can spend their money and that keeps rates low.

Given that explanation I hope you can understand that its not possible for WordAds to be 'unfair' to bloggers. It is possible that we could be better at our jobs. There might be an ad partner that we haven't tested yet that might enhance your earnings. That's what we focus on.

Vaguereference you suggest that we run affiliate ads from Amazon. We do run affiliate ads from Amazon and have for about 5 years. There is a common perception that these pay meaningful amounts. In our experience it doesn't pay well at all. We still run them but if that is all you run on your site you would earn nearly nothing. Affiliate programs only pay when someone buys a product vs. our brand ads which pay for views.

The hard truth about online advertising is that you need millions of ad views per month, and they need to be mostly from North America or the biggest European economies, before you are earning meaningful payouts. If you are much less than that then you must have realistic expectations or you will always be disappointed.

If you have any further questions about what is WordAds or your specific earnings please don't hesitate to get in touch with me at support@wordpress.com. Jon

I'd love to hear what other bloggers have done to get more return on their blogging efforts...

Thanks and have a great weekend everyone.

MyDestiny2011

I've got an idea: give us the ability to run ads from Amazon and Google's affiliate program the same way you can on Blogger. Those programs have enough quality control to where it shouldn't add any administrative overhead for WordPress.com.

The answer is that most of the pricing is out of our control. WordAds is the conduit between your site and the global online advertising marketplace. This marketplace is so big WordAds really has very little impact to influence those prices. With our volume we can negotiate deals that smaller sites couldn't on their own.

One of the biggest impacts that WordAds can make in pricing is by layering in as many quality ad partners as possible. So we do a lot of testing to see which partners have a pricing advantage and to make sure their ads are good quality.

If you wonder why online advertising can be so cheap we agree, we would be much happier if it was more expensive. But there is an enormous amount of inventory that advertisers can buy from. Facebook serves billions of ads each day. All that volume keeps prices low.

Another common question, seen here, is why one site earned more than another. The biggest factor is geographies of the visitors. Some countries visitors are valued by advertiser at vastly greater rates than others.

Regarding the idea of making a living from online ads, we agree its not easy. We have some sites that are doing it but you need over a million ad views per month and most of them in North America. For others, who are not at the level, we hope that at some point if they earn $100 payout that this is a welcome windfall.

"Earn money from your WordPress.com site by showing high quality advertisements. Make your passion a career."

I don't know if they intended to deceive here, but it's not realistic.

The wordads page on my dashboard says that for 4379 Ad impressions, I got $2.04.

Are these earnings correct, because I used to have AdWords on my old site, and they pulled much more money from much less traffic?