WordPress.com is run by Automattic, a for-profit firm. The blogging service is a good example of making money from free stuff: Automattic uses multiple “free business models” to earn profits from WordPress.com.
One of them is advertising: ads sometimes appear on WordPress.com blogs. Another is the freemium model. Although it’s free to blog at WordPress.com, there is a charge for some premium features. For example, I pay $10 a year so that this blog can go by the URI changingway.org.
There is now a new premium feature. Matt posted today, explaining (yet again) why WordPress.com needs to run ads – and explaining the new feature:
it’s easy to imagine blogs that would never want ads on them… Because of this we’ve introduced a premium option that gives you control: the No-ads upgrade.
With this upgrade, no one, whether they’re logged in or not, will see any ads on your blog. Ever. (Or at least as long as you subscribe to the upgrade.)
The No-ads upgrade can be purchased for 30 credits a year ($0.08 a day)
This is very good news, especially since this upgrade costs less than many of us expected. However, some will be disappointed that this is not the often-requested “let us run our own ads” upgrade.
But enough about other bloggers: what about me? Or, to be more precise, what about this blog? WordPress upgrades prices are per blog per year. The cost of running this blog will, when I buy the new upgrade, go through the buck a week barrier ($10 for domain mapping, $15 for CSS, $30 for no ads).
So, as a result of the new upgrade, this blog may become more, rather than less, commercial. In order to keep it at better than breakeven, I’ll have to use more affiliate links. That reminds me, did I tell you about Amazon’s new video on demand service, featuring such fine shows as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles?