How to earn (few) money with a WordPress site through advertising

Given that the motivation to open a blog, in my opinion, cannot and must not be to earn money, but to share experiences and emotions, in the following post I try to summarize the steps that allow you to display advertisements on your site WordPress and repay at least some of the annual subscription cost.

In WordAds and Earn section you can find details on WordAds, the WordPress embedded advertising program available for the site owner. Have a look also to the F.A.Q. section: there you can read, for example, that “Generally, you’re paid per impression (when the ad is seen by a visitor), not by click. That means the more visits you get, and the more each visitor uses your site, the more you’ll earn. Advertising rates fluctuate constantly“.

First of all, your WordPress site must be associated with a domain, so reachable not only through a wordpress.com subdomain (enzocontini.wordpress.com) but also with a primary mapped one (e.g. enzocontini.blog). To have a domain registered your WordPress site must not be a free one but on Premium, Business or eCommerce plans or, as I have, the cheaper Personal plan (currently 60€ per year). In the first three cases, you are automatically eligible for WordAds, while in the last one if you have, you have to ask for eligibility and you will receive a positive answer only if your traffic is above a target they have. I do not know how high is that target but I asked some years ago and I was not eligible for them while now that I asked again (and I have more than 76000 views per year) they agreed … so I suppose that this is the order of magnitude!

In my case, to ask for eligibility I had to register in WordAds site and, selecting the proper WordPress site of mine, asking for eligibility. The second time I contacted a WordPress Happiness Engineers through email, asking to re-evaluate my situation:

Note that, after you have subscribed to a plan, even a Personal one (and you need to have at least one paying plan to have domain and possibly be eligible to WordAds) , you can get a priority support from the Plan – My Plan page:

After a while, the 18th of July I received a confirmation email:

So, since then, one of my blog (this one with the Personal plan) became eligible:

You will see that some Ads areas will be available on all your blog posts and, having a look to the Plugin section you will notice that the Jetpack by Wodpress.com is now installed: this was done by WordPress people on the bases of my request because to do myself I should have a Business plan, as stated just on the top of that page:

Jackpack for WordPress.com plugin

At first, only ads about WordPress will be shown, but then, after several days, different ads will become to be available … possibly related in some way to the topic of your specific post!!

At first, only ads about WordPress were shown …

… but, after a few days, different ads will become to be available too, …

… possibly related to the topic of your specific post!!

After some delay (let’s say three weeks after next month) you can see, from the Setting -> WordAds page Earnings tab, how much you earned in the previous month. In the following, I show my earning page related to July, since the 18th, when I became eligible: … less than 2$ is not really a lot … but we are talking only of less more than 10 days and, in the beginning, ads were only WordPress ones so I do not know if those are bargained for payment or are simply a place holder!

Settings -> WordAds – Earnings

An alternative and perhaps easier way to follow your earnings is from the Statistics page, in the Ads tabs:

Statistics – Ads

The “problem” is that you will be paid (through Paypal) only when you will reach an amount of at least 100$ … so lets calculate approximately how long it takes! Moreover, the outstanding amount > 100$ will be paid approximately 45 days from the end of the month in which it has accrued.

Today a 0,39$ gain is shown

First of all not that the offered advertising is increasing by time to time … and we are in a holiday period now, so possibly the Internet is less used! However, if the numbers will be the one of today (for every day of next months), the gain should be about 10$ per month and after about 10 months the 100$ goal could be reached!! Let’s see … 🤔🤗
Note that WordAds generally provide a pay per view (and not also per click-through, lead, sale), so you need to have really a lot of access to your site to earn more!! You can see that the CPM (model refers to advertising bought on the basis of impression) media is different from day to day so even with the same number of traffic, the cash revenue can be quite different.

But anyway that is OK for me and it could be the same for you too if your goal is to be at least refunded about your WorsPress plan subscription!! 🙂

P.S. August:

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P.S. 30/4/2020

After some months, I can say that the predictions I did are more or less confirmed (a media monthly gain of 10$) even though the CPM in these last months is becoming very low possibly because of the economic crises due to the coronavirus pandemia. In the following the graphs where you can see the traffic, the CPM and the owning for each month.

Traffic during these last months

Advertisements during these last months

Monthly gain during these last months

how much I’ve earned in these last months

A you can notice, the number of advertising are increasing (even a loto) but the gain has remained the same or indeed decreased: this because the CPM media decreased a lot in the last months.

Anyway this type of advertising is worth to recover the money paid to have a Personal subscription in WordPress as I supposed since the beginning, when I wrote this post!!

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P.S. You can even try to earn some money through WordPress.com referrals, asking to be eligible using the refer.wordpress.com site.