When my critique group began blogging nine years ago, WordPress led the industry in providing new bloggers with a good start. You could set up a basic WordPress blog for free. And they offered free courses to help you be a successful blogger. And they had provided a daily blogging prompt. To keep their costs down, they put an advertisement on the bottom of your posts. Eventually, as your blog grew, you would want to upgrade to a paid website, if for no other reason than the increased storage capabilities.
For many bloggers, a free website is the only one they can afford, especially if they don’t use their blogs to generate income. (I fall into that category, but after a year or so I upgraded ARHtistic License to the lowest level of paid blog because I use a lot of images in my posts, and I filled up my image storage.)
A couple of years ago, the WordPress ads changed to “Sponsored Content,” a grouping of links to nine articles and advertisements including images that were, frankly, disgusting, like a half-dressed torso with a protruding gut, or a cross-section of a prostate gland, or a woman wearing inappropriate clothing. Is it just me, or does it seem like WordPress is purposely trying to nudge people into upgrading to a paid plan? Unfortunately, it’s working. I recently sprang to upgrade a group blog that I contribute to, because I didn’t want readers to abandon us because of the aforementioned disgusting ads at the bottom of our posts.
But yesterday I visited one of my favorite WordPress blogs which is beautiful and artistic, and as I passed from paragraph to paragraph, video advertisements popped up. What the heck?! It was incredibly distracting and annoying. I closed it out and went back to the article again, and this time no ads popped up until I got to the very end.
But, you know what? I don’t remember seeing ads on that blog before.
It’s dissatisfying for me to see the WordPress experience change like this. As it unreasonable to expect an altruistic company to continue on the same path when it could be increasing profits?
I am thinking about making a change.
One reason is that a couple of years ago I filled up my 13 Gigs of storage space on my WordPress Premium Plan, for which I pay $96 a year. I could upgrade to a Business site with 200 Gigs of storage for $300 a year. But really, 100 Gigs would be plenty, if it were available for $150-200 a year. I even asked WordPress if they would consider creating an in-between plan like that for bloggers who are not businesses. But no.
WordPress suggested that I could store my photos on Flickr and import them to my blog posts. So I opened a free account on Flickr, and it is now almost full. Also, I don’t have the ability to arrange photos the way I could if they lived in my WordPress image library.
I can add unlimited storage on Flickr for $72 a year. I might just bite the bullet and do that.
Or I might switch to a different platform.
Readers who blog, I need your help. What blogging platform do you use? How much do you pay for it? Do you like it? Have you used more than one blogging platform? Compare your experiences with them. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
ARHtistic License 
I moved to the business option ($300) almost immediately and have chosen not to have ads. I used them for a while but wasn’t making any money from it and I thought that they degraded the content of the blog.
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I agree that ads detract from the blog. I wondered how much people make when they choose to have ads on their blogs. You answered my question–thanks!
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The one place I know where you can upload as much media as you want for free is social media, then you can embed that media into your blog or website. I embed my own videos from YouTube and Facebook into my website, and as far as I know, you can embed images from Instagram as well.
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Thanks for the tip. I’ll try that out.
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I, too, went to a payed plan in part because of those disgusting ads. And I think that’s exactly what WordPress intended; I have no place in my heart for them or any other business out to get my money. I am hoping to solve the storage problem by deleting my earlier posts. Some of my friends are on Blogger, but there seem to be constant technical issues with it, from trouble leaving comments to a failure to screen out Spam. WordPress does a good job on screening out Spam; gotta give them credit for that.
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Yes, let’s give credit where it’s due–WordPress does screen out a lot of spam.
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I use WordPress & Blogger. I keep my images & my text content on personal flash drives & upload from there. I refuse to pay for anything. I can’t anyway, I’m a disabled senior on a very restricted income.
So many writers have fled WordPress for other platforms that I rarely read blogs that I used to really enjoy. I wrote a rant about this yesterday. Many of them went to Substack, which has a tier system … you can subscribe for free, but you don’t get to read the entire article. It really sucks.
I HATE CAPITALISM.
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I have noticed a lot of people migrating to Substack. I wonder if it’s profitable. But I’d rather that people read my posts for free.
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I feel the same way.
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It is my understanding Everything I about to change..we will see what happens.
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That sound cryptic. I’m waiting.
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I went to the paid version (the $96 version) from the first and have never had ads. I agree with you about how disgusting they are, and just the fact that they never change! You have to look at the same ones on every blog that has them.
I have been blogging for 11 years and I use a lot of images, but I am only at 15% of my limit. I don’t post nearly as often as you do though. I do edit my photos to reduce their file size though — a photo that is originally 7 MB will go down to about 440 kb, and it is still large enough that if people click on it, they see a full page view.
I also pay for Flickr because I just like having my photos safe online in case my computer fails, and I love the way you can arrange them, and quickly see all of them. I tag them there, and then when I am looking for a certain photo, I can find it quickly. But I have never imported them into WordPress. I should learn to do that!
I am on Blogger for the art quilt group The Endeavourers. It seems to offer fewer choices in the size and placement of photos, fonts, etc.
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Thanks for your thoughts. Importing a picture from Flickr is easy. Just copy its address on Flickr and paste it into the desired location on your WordPress post.
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I used Wix but I didn’t like that they didn’t have things like the like button.
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I love the like button. I love it when I see lots of likes. I love seeing who hits the like button–and it’s usually the same people, over and over. I like to hit the like button instead of commenting when I’m busy or have nothing to say that hasn’t been said already by others. At very least, the like button tells me someone was here, someone read my piece, someone wants me to know they were here and read my piece.
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Yes I agree
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