When I used to maintain adsense ads on my news service [WiredPages-- html site], I noticed some great ads and the payout seemed to be more. My blogs [WordPress] get the same ads that most get and so were not as unique. If clicked, payout tended to be lower. Q...
I've checked into Wordpress in detail. I've made sites with a static frontpage, only showed 1 post per page with comments off, and had category pages that showed post titles only. I've made pages that had (using various plugins) either no archive area obviously visible, or very altered. Thing is, with all those sites - they still looked like blogs. It's just a personal thing, but these days everybody, their brother, and their brother's dog have blogs. The thing that makes them so easy and convenient is leading to the web being saturated with them. I'm not saying you can't have success with one, nor that a static site is intrinsically better. I'm just saying that when I want some casual reading I'll look at blogs. If I'm doing research (this includes buying research), I'll look at static sites and ignore blogs. Again, it's a personal preference, but I think people see that blog "look" and the site loses some credibility.