I'm glad I'm not the only one getting rubbish returns on advertising on WP, although I use WP.com. My issue with them is that my ad earnings dropped from $800 last May to what's going to be around $200 this May - a decrease of four times in a year - now I get more hits and a lower bounce rate.

That might be due to GDPR, but I'm sure the company is bullshitting me, nothing has that much of an impact on revenue.

Having said that WP is second to none in terms of useable software, IF you use the old version and not the truly awful monstrosity that is the block editor.

And at least with WP I know that what I'm earning is the true 'market value' of the knowledge i put out, or at least the true market value as filtered by Google.

On Steem, most of my content has a true market value of 0 but it's gifted rewards through a patronage system - i.e. people don't read anything but they upvote you regularly because they like you, and the amount of patronage you get is broadly correlated with the amount of Steem you've got vested (i.e you'll get more upvotes from large accounts if you invest more).

Hence I'm still undecided if I should classify my rewards on Steem as earnings, it's the wrong word technically, although ATM I do call them earnings!

This might actually change to an extent with some ideas @oracle-d has about getting investors to pay people to write content on steem via delegation.

I think I 'earn' about as much a month on steem as I do through ads on WP, but it's kind of hard for me to make a comparison as they're too very different outlets for me.

Steem's a lot more fun, that's for sure.

Sorry about the long comment, love this topic, and I should be doing the washing up now, this is a good distraction!