WordPress takes aim at Google’s AdSense with WordAds

WordPress, a popular open source blogging tool and publishing platform, launched today its own advertising initiative conveniently dubbed WordAds. Just to make sure everyone is on the same page here, the company began a post on its official blog by saying its users “deserve better than AdSense”. Ouch! In another nod at Google’s AdSense, the WordPress team explained why it took them so long to roll out adverts on their platform:

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.

They are teaming up with Federated Media, which connects top blogs and web sites with leading brand marketers. If you run a WordPress blog, feel free to apply here to begin making money from WordAds. Many established media outlets entrust their online publishing operations to the WordPress engine, including the CNN and Fortune blogs and this site. Yes, Google absolutely dominates the online advertising game, but WordPress is no ordinary company either.

In addition to being the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress powers over 14.7 percent of top one million web sites, according to Alexa, and was found on 22 percent of all new websites as of August 2011, up from 8.5 percent. Also important, 22 out of every hundred active new domains in the United States use the WordPress CMS engine and more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs come online every day.