Attention, WordPress bloggers: Your ship may have just come in.

According to Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, there are more than 63 million WordPress sites in the world, and about half of those are actually hosted by WordPress itself. But for such a large number of bloggers (15 percent of all websites on the Internet, says Automattic), the actual returns have amounted to little more than compliments and publicity.

However, WordPress has just taken a big step toward changing that by partnering with Federated Media Publishing to offer ads to millions of WordPress blog users. The deal was announced at the Web 2.0 Summit and will allow all WordPress blog users – no matter the size of their audience – to participate in Federated Media’s advertising network.

Although bloggers will not have the ability to choose which individual ads will be displayed on their site, they will have the choice of ad themes.

"FM is the perfect partner for us to offer opt-in, premium advertising to WordPress users for the first time ever," says Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic. "FM has years of experience in bringing together leading brands and top bloggers and will now bring that experience to our network of tens of millions of bloggers and hundreds of millions of readers."

The ad options will be available to WordPress bloggers in the first quarter of 2012.