A Review of WordPress WordAds vs. Google Adsense

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WordPress

WordPress announced WordAds today on their blog, and many people are already excited about the possibility of monetizing their blog for some easy cash.

There are plenty of ways currently to earn money off your blog, one of the more popular ones being by serving up Google Adsense advertisements for CPC (Cost per click) and CPM (cost per impression) revenue. So how does the new WordPress Ads match up to the Google alternative?

Here is a recent quote from the WordPress blog, who say their new WordAds is actually far superior to Adsense, “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.”

Sounds great, but the bad news is WordAds won’t be open to everyone. Judging by the example websites given by WordPress, they are hunting for high traffic and high quality blogs. Of course we all think our websites are the best, but I doubt the moderators who approve applications for WordAds will agree with you.

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“Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog.  Some blogs may not be accepted.

There’s a simple application form for anyone interested in taking part in the WordAds experiment, which is the same with Google. The only difference is that Google approves most people, while WordPress is likely to reject them. It’s interesting that WordPress would announce WordAds as a rival to AdSense, considering the program looks to be exclusive and through a partnership with Federated Media.

In a perfect world we’d all love to have 250,000 monthly pageviews to our blog, but that just isn’t a reality. For most people they have less than 100,000 monthly visitors, but still want to capitalize on that traffic. The droves of WordPress bloggers already excited about the possibilities don’t realize they would likely be rejected by WordAds.

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Image via CrunchBase

Judging from the WordAds examples provided on other websites, it seems as though there will be very few WordPress sites which would meet the standards set from the application process. Comparing this to the Adsense platform which is massive and represents a large number of sites seems a bit of a stretch at this point. It’s also hard to see WordPress competing with the level of volume and cookie based targeting that Google Adsense can offer.

I’ve tried a lot of ad platforms over the years, and to this day Adsense is still one of the best in terms of ease of use, ad targeting, and high payouts. The best (and most important part) is that Google Adsense has approved me every time I’ve applied to serve advertising on a new blog. Withing 10 minutes I have targeted Ads ready to go with great options for colors, layouts, formatting, and channels.

Those are what I look for in a quick and dirty CPC/CPM ad platform, how about you? I have no problem with WordPress launching a new advertising platform, but don’t tout WordAds as an alternative, much less superior than Adsense quite yet.

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  • Ali

    How much approx traffic is required for WordAds/Google Adsense Approval….

    • Xavier

      I just got approved for WordAds on my site and we get about 100 views each day, so not as high as I used to think.

  • http://www.parenterest.com Sarah

    I was approved for Wordads on my site and we hit 17,000 views in 2 months. Its not anywhere near 100,000 but its taking off relatively quickly. I am interested to see how the ads play out. So far they are posting youtube ads at the end of my blogs.

    • http://keithbrown.com/ Keith Brown

      Interesting thanks for the feedback Sarah. I haven’t seen many people yet actually reporting back real data, so appreciate the update!