One of the many things you can do here on WordPress is earn money from your blog. There are (apparently) quite a few ways to do this. One of the more simple ways to earn money (at least I thought) was to show ads on your site, specifically on your posts. Seems simple enough, right? Write something. Post it. Ads show up on your page as people view it. You make money from them seeing the ads.
I did this a while back and I am starting to wonder if its a bit of a scam as there doesn’t really appear to be a rhyme or reason to how you earn money. Yes, I am aware that the more volume/traffic you have is supposed to get you more ads displayed, which I thought in turn would also create more money added to your account. It doesn’t, however, seem that this is actually the case.
I experimented a while back, August of 2022, to see if I could figure out how to earn more. What I found is that traffic doesn’t exactly mean you earn more. As such, I am beginning to wonder if using WordPress ads is a scam.
Here’s the thing: If an ad (any ad) is displayed anywhere on my blog, shouldn’t I get paid? They are allowed to insert an ad in my content – literally renting space on my site to display an ad that a company paid them to display. Forget the whole “bidding” thing. Volume shouldn’t matter. If an ad takes space on my site, I should get paid (at minimum) $0.01 per ad. But it looks like they get to rent space for any ad for free, even though they were paid for the advertising by the company purchasing space. If they are randomly generated and randomly displayed, there is nothing to really debate here. If this post has two ads displayed each time it is viewed, I should get paid for the two ads displayed during each view.
But, apparently it doesn’t work that way. Misleading, isn’t it?
A few shots to show a comparison. The first set of pics displays one of the best months I have seen while having ads on my site. As you can see, “Ads Served” doesn’t necessarily mean more income since September 2020 had more ads served but October 2020 had fewer ads but more income. Seems rather random, doesn’t it?
So, that sure makes one wonder when looking at how this whole thing works. Doesn’t it? Here are the test results from (basically) two year later.
August of 2022 saw 846 ads served – the most ever since I set this up – and yet was only paid $0.01. Notice the month prior (July 2022) only 206 ads were served but the earnings were the same as the following month. Yet, June of 2022 saw even fewer ads served but there was triple the earnings.
Got questions now? Yeah, me too. But I am leaning towards WordPress cheating the people they “rent” space from.
They need to pay for ALL ads served. Pure and simple.
Piss and Moan 
I used to get paid more for Ads but over time I’ve noticed that WordPress has been paying less and less even though they keep serving more and more ads. When I asked a Happiness Engineer about it they kept making excuses even though what they said didn’t really make any sense and wasn’t really a response to what I was asking. So, I’ve decided to get rid of WordAds altogether. I would rather that than them making money off my blog.
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Thanks for the response! I sure wonder about that. I am glad to hear that someone with way more experience and followers is seeing a difference too. I truly believe they are scamming people at this point. I appreciate you letting me know that you reached out to them and have now done away with it. I think I will follow a similar path now.
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You’re welcome and yes you are certainly not the only one. Yeah, getting rid of ads is really the best way to deal with the issue. I keep trying to get rid of the ads but I can’t seem to figure it out so I’ll just have to talk to the Happiness Engineers.
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Wait….so there isn’t just a switch to turn it off? That’s kinda suspect! Once on, always on? Yeah, that doesn’t sit right.
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I’ve been checking everywhere and haven’t found a way to turn the Ads off. They literally advertise the plans by saying you can have an Ad free blog and yet I don’t see an Ad free option anywhere. It’s so weird. I’ll just have to talk to them directly I guess.
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I can’t find a way either. I remember you have to “enroll” to have ads but it’s weird that you can’t stop showing them when you choose to. I would appreciate knowing what you end up finding out or the the steps you took to banish them forever. LOL
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I’ll talk to the Happiness Engineers and let you know if there’s any way to do it manually. Didn’t realise it would be a whole thing lol.
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Hey. Not sure if you’re still interested in switching off WordAds but you have to go to Tools>Earning and disable them from there.
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Thanks, I will check that out. Do you know…if they owe you money will they pay it once disabled? Not a lot but still, it’s the principle of it.
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I don’t think they will pay you unless it’s over $100 but you can ask the Happiness Engineers if they can make an exception. They do that sometimes.
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After following your directions, I realized that was probably a silly question since it is just disabling ads and the possiblity of turning them back on in the future was there. Thanks so much for the follow-up!
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Thank you for taking the time to post this. I am new here, I just started a blog, and decided try WordAds. So far, 8 ads have been served, yet I have no earnings, which prompted me to look into things, leading me to your post. While at a smaller scale, it is exactly what you described here. Now I know I will need to apply a different monetization strategy to my blog because obviously WordAds is not going to be an effective strategy. Thank you again for posting this and I hope more WordPress users find your post so they do not end up wasting their time.
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Thanks, D.M. I appreciate you letting me know that it helped you and I am certain you will find something that works for you. But, yeah, WordPress is essentially using bloggers for ad space and not paying for it. Good luck, and welcome to the “blogosphere”!
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