According to this New York Times piece, there’s money to be made in blogging. But I agree with Canadian journalist Mark Evans, whose own blog is a relative biggie in the blogosphere, in saying, oh really?
Sure, there are individual bloggers making a good living from advertising but those are few and far between. But for most people, the only revenue flowing their way is an occasional AdSense cheque from Google. I think most of the serious money - if you can call $50 million to $100 million “serious” given it’s a drop in the advertising bucket - is being snapped up by blogging firms such as Weblogs Inc. that can offer advertisers an easy way to reach a large number of different consumers. This approach is opposed to the individual blogger who, if they have enough traffic and an advertising-friendly site, can be tossed a bone across the transom once in awhile.
The truth is that aside from some boldface bloggers, the chances are slim to none that a blog can cover its costs via AdSense or any of the other ad syndication tools out there, which is a shame given that folks like Mark Evans, and even our own site IP&Democracy, are well-read by the right people. That’s why I hope ventures such as John Battelle’s Federated Media initiative find the right model so that well-informed, expert bloggers can keep up the dialog and interesting commentary.
Cynthia Brumfield at 2:24 PM|Comments(4)
OK, I agree that certain low-cost blogs and free blogs can easily cover their costs with smartly positioned Google AdSense ads. But, my experience with AdSense is that the click-throughs are few and far between, and $50 per month sounds like a very high performing blog for an individual or a small, niche blog, which are most blogs.
And Alec, you've been publishing since 2002. How long did it take you to get to $50 per month? I would bet there were many months, if not years, before you reached that level.
Posted by: Cynthia Brumfield at November 28, 2005 11:26 PM
I'm making $50 to $60 per month, with hosting costs of $7. I'm not in it for the money, obviously, but I am certainly covering costs and then some.
Posted by: Alec Saunders at November 28, 2005 11:02 PM
I second what Rob said. It's very easy to cover the costs of blogging, especially given that most blogs are on free services. Even when I had a fraction of the traffic I now have I eaily covered the cost of my hosting plan and domain registration.
Making a living from blogging is a whole different story though. :-)
Posted by: Michael at November 28, 2005 5:33 PM
"The truth is that aside from some boldface bloggers, the chances are slim to none that a blog can cover its costs via AdSense ..."
It depends on what your "costs" are, doesn't it? A modestly popular blog (like mine, around 250,000 page views a month) can get by with pretty much no costs at all. So every dollar I make (albeit, not much) is pure profit.
Perhaps it's different with a politically-oriented blog, where AdSense really doesn't have much to home in on that might be marketable, compared to a technology or game related blog like mine.
Posted by: Rob Stevens at November 28, 2005 3:18 PM
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