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 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 the 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.
If the ads you see are found at the end of blog posts then what you are seeing is WordPress.com generated advertising. To
eliminate all advertising on our free hosted WordPress.com blogs we can purchase an annually renewable No-Ads upgrade.