Can You Make Money with Word Ads on Word Press?

I have had this website for about 8 months now, and in the last couple of weeks i have taken it way more seriously. With pretty good results so far (thanks for that!) My monthly viewers have gone from about 300 people to about 15,000 with a little bit of marketing and promotion. Something i am not particularly good at, but with effort and some learning it seems to be improving. You can read what i tried here. It worked for me in my niche of education, so might be worth a little research in yours.

Once i started with WordPress i was on the premium plan which came with Word Ads included. I thought i would give it try, its always nice to see money coming in. I knew it would be small, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as small as it turns out.

This is my graph. You can see that so far i am still below buying a can of coke or a cup of tea for the year so far. Now my views were pretty low for an great deal of that time so i kinda expected it. However, if there are no ad bidders on your ad space they will fill it up with in house ads, for which you dont get a penny.

At first i didn’t mind as I thought ads (I was new at this!) made it look more established, but the longer this has gone on the more i think seeing these empty, or in house adverts actually detracts from my website. Especially now i have more content and resources appearing daily. So I am in two minds.

I spoke to the WordPress staff, who are the most helpful customer service i have ever encountered!!, and they explained that although traffic is a factor and a fairly big one, they also look at website content as well.

Well mine, if you have been on other pages is fairly family friendly, but still an RPM of 0.01 even for CPM income is pretty poor. my viewers come from all over, USA, Europe, India, Philippines so even with lower RPM from some countries it should have been better.

I spoke to them and said i will leave them for another month, as my traffic has jumped a lot in the last couple of weeks. However, i have had Adsense on the site for about 4 weeks and that is pulling in about 8 USD a day from the new viewers, and it seems a little crazy to have so much real estate on my site occupied by Word Ads for what works out as about 0.01 a month! In December there were 4000 ads impressions and i earned literally not even that 1 cent.

I will update this post exactly one month today, so if you are reading this after February and there is not an advert right above this you know that i left WordAds and have stuck, for the moment at least, with Adsense. I know, as i have seen others results that it has worked for them and similar viewing numbers to me have brought in a dollar or two CPM. Maybe i am just unlucky!

I will be honest though, i am not hopeful!

**update** I just had a 3800 view day (26th January) that had a RPM of 0.00 there will be an updated posts quicker than a month from the date of this. I am giving it one day in February to see if its a monthly bidding process and if its not, well i was lucky enough to get some traffic through so i will be moving onto pastures somewhat greener!

What ad network have you found that works for you, maybe Mediavine or others if your traffic is higher than mine. Let us know in the comments below.

About the Author

Hi I’m Marc. A teacher of over 15 years, mostly English but dabbled in outdoor pursuits and media. Thought it was about time to sharing both what I have learnt during that time and the resources I have put together. On this site we aim to teach the theory and share our thoughts, but also go that one step further and give you access to the hard resources you need for your class or for you children. Feel free to take at look at our resources, email us, or jump on the Facebook group to ask questions. Happy learning, teaching or playing!

Post by Marc of Making English Fun

Making English Fun!

I have been a teacher of English for over 15 years, in that time i made hundreds and thousands of resources and learnt so much i think its worth sharing. Hopefully to help teachers and parents around the world.