This plugin is one that is very specific for Germany. I just had to look up the English term to describe what “VG Wort” is: a performance rights organization. This organization pays authors (books, magazines, online text content), when people read them. Every new blog post gets a “tracking pixel” and any person reading my content from Germany count towards a payout. After one year, every blog post that reach at least 1500 visits from Germany, gets me some royalty payment. The amount per blog post various every year. I don’t make a lot of money, but it helps me to cover some of my hosting costs. Now that you know how getting money through VG Wort work, let’s see how this plugin helps me in the process.

What does Worthy do?

With the Worty plugin, authors can add tracking pixels to blog posts. It adds an option to the sidebar of the Block Editor and to the blog posts list view. A blog post needs to have a certain length (unless they are lyric poetry). The plugin shoes if blog posts have reach that length and then offers a link or radiobox to add a tracking pixel.

It also helps you to assign an individual tracking pixel to a single post. Getting those tracking pixels is quite a complex process. But you can download a CSV with many tracking pixels and then import them into Worthy. There is even a premium version that allows you get them imported automatically from an API and to “report” back the URL of the blog posts to VG Wort, once the blog post reach the minimum number of visits for the first time (in following years, you don’t have to report the same blog post again, it will automatically be considered for a payout, if the minimum number of visits is reach again). So since this “reporting back” only needs to be done once per blog posts and as only very few reach that limit, I have not seen the need for the premium version. But for larger blogs, it might save you more time than it costs.

Why do I use Worthy?

I have been using a different plugin for VG Wort before, but this one only helped my identifying the blog posts that are long enough and to visualize with ones already have a tracking pixel assigned. Adding the tracking pixel was a complete manual process. I would copy the HTML tag from the CSV, paste it in a meta field in the blog post, and then copy back the URL into the CSV, so I keep track of the tracking pixels I’ve already used.

Fortunately, switching to Worthy was really simple, as it offers a migration from a handful of other VG Wort plugins. There is now an official plugin from VG Wort called “VG WORT METIS“, and it sounds like it offers all the functionality from Worthy Premium, like ordering tracking pixels from VG Wort and reporting back the URLs of the blog posts. But I don’t want to migrate just now. I might test it in my new blog and then write about that plugin in more detail.

I have long removed all classical ads from my blog and only use this rather privacy-friendly monetization option. I still had to add a section to my privacy policy, since VG Wort needs to process IP addresses, in order to find out, if a visit was coming from Germany. One interesting fact is, that the content you write does not need to be written in German. If you read this blog post in English, but from Germany, it also counts towards the minimum number of visits of the blog post topic, so I use the same tracking pixel for both languages. I do that by using a small helper plugin I’ve written, that connects MultilingualPress and Worthy. I might extend that plugin to also work with other VG Wort plugins or other translation plugins.

Conclusion

I don’t know how many of you reading my blog in English even need a plugin like Worthy. Only if you publish magazines, books, etc. in Germany or you write blog posts for an audience in Germany, signing up for VG Wort makes sense.

Are there ways you monetize your online presence, but without using classical ads, sponsored content or affiliate links?