Since WordPress burst onto the blog publishing scene, it has been a free service but this status may be poised to change. The company, which took some angel financing, earlier this year is experimenting with “contextual adsense” advertising. Here's Matt Mullenweg's explanation:

“Depending on how it goes, it could enable you guys to put your own ads on the site, or some sort of share. We don't know yet. The main is that if ads aren't going to be worth it on the site, we'd rather not have them at all for free users (Yours or ours).”

In many ways, WordPress adopting some kind of advertising platform is no surprise. With the service growing and investors now on board, WordPress needs to evolve from a cool public service to a revenue-generating business. Mullenweg has talked about his company, Automattic, selling value-added services to WordPress users but that could be a challenge given WordPress users are used to paying nothing. So, advertising seems like a natural way to generate revenue given the advertising market's growth and WordPress's popularity. If Mullenweg can convince WordPress users (like me) that the introduction of advertising will be a win-win scenario, he may not have much resistence.

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