www.ads-software.com is the total package – it has limitless extensibility, you can get it to do anything you want and create any type of site, and monitize it however you want – you also own the content because it’s self-hosted (you pay a host to host the content, which you own – and the CMS licence is freeware).
Wordpress.COM is very limited – the one and only positive is that you don’t pay for hosting (so you save about $2 or 3/month (like nothing)… BUT:
You don’t own your content – if wordpress.com decided tomorrow that they didn’t like your blog, they could delete it with a few strokes of a keyboard and it’ll be gone forever and nothing you can do about it.
You are HEAVILY restricted on earnings 0 unlike self hosted where you can monetize however you please, you are restricted to not monetizing at all but having it be ad supported in order to use your blog (ad network integration is prohibited) – or you can use WordPress’s “WordAds” ad network – which by all accounts is extremely finicky about what type of content they will and won’t monetize, traffic requirements, and they pay RIDICULOUSLY low compared to literally any other ad network because they have you in a position of it being “Them or nobody”
You can’t even integrate analytics in your .com without paying
Very limited ability to customize the appearance
the subdomain “yoursite.wordpress.com” looks tacky and no longer has the silver lining of an SEO benefit
Frankly there’s just no reason not to have your main blog on WordPress.com – maybe a secondary on .com for citation value?
