WordPress Introduces Way for Bloggers to Earn More

One of the internet’s biggest blog hosting sites WordPress.com has made a move to ensure blogging is more sustainable by allowing sites to easily accept recurring payments. Only users with paid WordPress and sites that use the company’s Jetpack toolkit are eligible for it.

There are fears that blogging is on the decline especially due to the fact that it is difficult to make money from it. So this new feature is one possible answer to the question of how to make money with WordPress.

Mark Armstrong, the founder of Longreads and an editor at Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company) said, “Especially from a small publisher, small business, sustainability perspective, subscriptions, and memberships are such a key foundational element to monetizing your site in 2019.”

According to Armstrong, the idea was to build something simple that could be integrated relatively easily, so that sites could immediately begin collecting revenue from their audiences. Armstrong said that an early version of the product was first tested at Longreads.

He said, “We provided a lot of feedback in terms of the things that we had seen.

 “We’ve had a membership and subscription for Longreads, going back to 2011. So about eight years of experience working with memberships and subscriptions.”

The thing about this product, though, is that it does duplicate some functionality — like, say, with PayPal’s WordPress plug-in. This fits into a broader trend of enabling creators to accept payments and build communities in easy ways. If it’s not a Patreon competitor, it’s definitely influenced by the site.

But Armstrong doesn’t see it as a conflict. “I think we’re all supportive of all of the other products that exist within the WordPress ecosystem,” he says.

“Patreon, Memberful, WooCommerce — which is part of our own company, so they have a memberships and subscriptions extension as well.” Those other products serve a slightly different need and are available to all WordPress blogs — not just the ones that are paid.

According to Armstrong users tend to choose a service based on their needs. He says WordPress’ new recurring payments feature would work for local organizations trying to start a fundraising membership program, or maybe a podcaster that’s just getting off the ground. “Recurring payments are critical for pretty much any small business. And that’s really at the core of our user base.”

Armstrong says that the company is always working on its e-commerce offerings. “So I would expect to see a lot more of that in the future.”