Having a free WordPress.com website is great. It really is. You launch it for free. They host it for free. You can publish all the posts and pages you want. Publish to your heart’s content. Post, post, post. Free, free, free! It never costs you a dime to have a free WP.com website. This is as it should be. It makes perfect sense. Especially economic sense.
But as the saying goes, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.
“Lunch” incurs expenses. It costs something. Costs are unavoidable. Lunch gets paid for by somebody. But if not by you, then by who?
Enter the Ads
Actually, the ads that inevitably show up (usually below your content) on every page of your free WP.com site are called “Sponsored Content”. Maybe they will call them something else in the future. Euphemisms come and go. “A rose by any other name…” is still an ad!
That is how WordPress.com pays for your free lunch. In exchange for giving you a free website, which they agree to host and maintain for you, you agree to let them place these ads on your site.
So, free isn’t exactly free.
You still have to pay a price. Actually, you pay two prices. These are:
- You have NO control over the content of the ads.
- You cannot get rid of the ads. They continue to bloom and grow… just like roses.
So, if you want to keep your website here free of charge, this is the “price” you have to pay.
Unless, of course,…
You are willing to pay a small price (in money) to change this.
If you no longer want to have the ads popping up on every page all the time — and you are willing to pay a certain fixed price to take these ads off of your site, well, then–
Has WordPress.com got a deal for you!
I accepted their offer. It was irresistible. I am a Calvinist. I don’t even try to resist the irresistible.
Exit the Ads
For the paltry sum of $48 a year, excluding sales tax, as of today, our Free Christian Curriculum website is now AD-FREE. Hurray!
No more annoying “sponsored content”. I have just unsponsored it.
For this same marginal amount paid, I was also able to use a top-level domain (TLD) for the site. Bonus!
Obviously, there is still MUCH to be done. This is merely a small update that I wanted to share with you. We’re taking baby steps and moving forward, little by little, making progress toward our goal of providing a fully-developed, FREE Christian curriculum website.
Onward.
More coming soon…
Free Christian Curriculum 