Of course, the other thing those sites have going for them is that people will invest in upgrades they don’t really need just to support the site. WordPress.com aren’t perceived as needing any extra help, so it’s harder for them to sell paid features and they’re that much more reliant on advertising.

I think rain’s right about the push to attract funding (failure to deliver on other long-promised features such as the theme marketplace and weekend .com support suggests they’ve burned through the last round, and I doubt they’d be able to launch talkpress without another one). And I still wouldn’t rule out some sort of advertising partnership with a desperate Yahoo.

There’s an additional factor. I really think they’re looking to attract funding from major media sources, and those are very keen on advertising. I think this upgrade is completely off the table until the next round of funding is closed, and I think they want that to happen soon.

Raincoaster’s “quote” actually comes from a couple of months ago where she mentioned in passing that Automattic couldn’t be making that much money off of advertising and how the $29 million just raised outdistanced the amount. I walked her through the numbers and showed here is was about at the same level. Even if a blog makes ten cents a day, when multiplied by the number of active and viewed blogs over at wp.com, it’s some serious cash every month coming in.

The ten bucks a month seems high to me. At ten cents a day on average, I’d put it more around $3-4 a month brought it. It’s still some serious cash. Do remember though that for every high end blog that gets 5k hits a day, there’s hundreds that only get a few hits so I think it balances.

edublogs.org is removing adverts at $25 a year as well as throwing in some extra features.