WordPress.com has made two new features available to their users a couple of days ago. Both of them are cool, but pay close attention to their monetization strategy.

Private Blogs - this feature allows a blog publisher to request her blog to be unlisted in seach engine. While they test out the system, currently only 5 members of WordPress.com can be added to access private blogs.

Custom CSS - this is the first paid upgrade feature. Many blog publishers have requested the ability to add their own custom CSS codes and tweak their blog’s design. But not everyone can get free access. This upgrade costs 15 credits per year — which costs $1 for each credit.

Obviously you cannot get everything for free unless you are Google. Opening an account at WordPress.com is still free. It still comes with sizzling templates. But for advanced features, a payment is required.

In fact, responses to a thread about Paid Upgrade Ideas in WordPress.com have proven that many of us are willing to pay for neat features.

One thing though. If a blogger is serious into blogging strategy for their business, they would like to host that on their own domain. Business blogs tend to pay, at least more likely to do so compared to personal blogs. So the next feature might be to add domain mapping.

If that happens, I could think of many benefits to use WordPress.com in comparison to launching my own hosted WordPress blog. Mainly because I don’t have to maintain and upgrade the code.