can i put ads on my wordpress blog, NOT self hosted?

[Mark]

my blog is hosted for free by wordpress. can i put any kind of ads on it to make money? who do i contact?

[Vinayak]

Yes you can

[Jake]

If you are on Wordpress.com you may have to pay an upgrade fee to get your own domain name, usually the popular Adsense ads can only be placed by the domain name owners, those using a free subdomain may have to do ad revenue sharing with the host.

[marcus]

Only if your blog becomes really popular and gets lots of traffic, but in that case, why would you stick with free hosting?

[julitasoup]

No, you cannot, except under one circumstance, which I will outline in a minute.

There is only one advertising program allowable on Wordpress.com and that is WordAds and it is only allowed on self-hosted blogs after applying to WordAds and being accepted by them. There is no paid content or sponsored content allowed either.

Your best bet if you want to monetize your blog is to buy a domain name from one of the many registrars, such as NameCheap or GoDaddy and use a Wordpress.org theme on an independent hosting company such as BlueHost or Hostgator.

A TLD or top level domain name is usually not more than 9 or 10 bucks a year and hosting can be had on a shared server throguh either of the companies I mentioned above for 4 to 8 dollars a month. You wipl get the best deal if you buy hosting in a year long package. if you choose to pay it monthly, the price will be almost double. Still, paying 7 or 8 dollars a month and paying it on a monthly basis for hosting is pretty inexpensive.

I also suggest that you do a search for best hosting cokmpanies, best value, etc and do the same for domain name registrars. There are many, many of each so do due diligence to find the best fit for you, Make sure they are reputable, have a good track record for up-time and good tools for you to build your site, have good tools for analytics so you can measure trasffic and most important of all, excellent 24/7 customer and tech support, both via chat and phone. I cannot emphasize this enough!

Regardless of the choice you make, always read the terms of service. They are almost always accessed via a link at the bottom of each page.
Hope this helps.

[Andrew Peters]

Go for self hosted, why on earth would you not do it? It will cost you a couple of bucks per month.