Blogging for Dollars
2:41 pm July 17th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
There is another professional blogger article up, this time it’s at Business Week. I thought these were over with, I mean, who is surprised at this point that a web site that people work on full time can generate income? The amount of income is often surprising, but given how much traffic some of these sites are getting some of the numbers actually seem low.
The article, or rather 14 short posts, goes over site’s like Boing Boing, Mashable, Tech Crunch, Perez Hilton, and some other high points. At the low end there is Kottke and Overheard In New York who make just a few grand a month, but for sites like Mashable are they claiming up to $166,000 a month!
I am guessing that a some of the revenue numbers were gotten by going to something like Federated Media’s site or open statistics links and extrapolating the number of pageviews per month (or maybe uniques) then multiplying it by the number of ads and then by the CPM. This does not factor in discount sales, the CPM rate of backfill ads, and sell-through rate (which is generally lower than 100%) but it’s still interesting to see what the site’s could be making.
The list falls short because does not include a lot of sites, especially those with lower traffic numbers but that have gotten very good at monetizing their site but it will be an eye-opener for many people. For example, I had no idea that Talking Points Memo was so big (I don’t believe that 550k pageviews a weekday number anyway)!
So blogging is semi-big-business when you do it full time with smart people who would succeed in almost any position you put them in, many of whom not only have a great understanding of their field but also of the workings of the internet, who knew?
