TheAgitator.com
(Not) Rolling In It
Sunday, October 5th, 2008This Slate article on how bloggers make money makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong:
Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.
This site brings in about 250,000 uniques a month, 350,000 when you include RSS feeds. I’ve never really figured out how to monetize those numbers. With Google ads, I bring in about $1,000 per year, and I get about another $500-$1,000 per year in donations. I had Blogads for a while, but dropped them after going several months without any advertisers. Seemed more prudent to use that space for another set of Google ads.
I’m not complaining. I blog because I enjoy it, and never really intended to make a living at it. But I gotta’ say, I sure wouldn’t mind bringing in $75K off this blogging stuff.
Radley, just what you’ve done regarding Dr Haynes the Mississippi coroner is worth $75K. I’m a liberal and a yallah dawg Democrat and don’t miss a day visiting here. Shame there’s no justice (in the big, heavenly sense).
1) I don’t know that LOLcats and Overheard in New York are really blogs–I’m not familiar w/ the latter but I assume it’s the same thing as LOLcats where there’s really no original content, just user submissions.
2) There’s not really a marketing angle for your site in the same way that there is for a lot of non-political/partisan-political sites.
3) $75k what?!
Color me cynical, but I would want to see some documentation of those numbers before I believed them (this is the result of far too much reviewing of documents for VC investments).
I make only a fraction of what you make, but I make more per unique visitor. I’ll tell you this: The single site design change which made the largest difference in my Google Ad revenue was moving the ads from the right side of the page to the left side. I guess it has something to do with the way people scan a page for content. My income more than doubled.
You don’t have enough advertisements. Plus, political blogs bring in less money than an innocuous blog like a cat blog. Some advertisers have restrictions on that kind of thing.
Google will never pay you enough. Don’t forget that they’re evil.
This also demonstrates the difference between the average and the median. The average of the various blogs might make $75K, but as they note, a few high-earners can skew that figure. The median is probably much closer to Radley’s figure.
Libertarians are cheap. They don’t click on ads – in fact, they have plugins in their browsers to disable those ads.
This kind of story exemplifies the problem of using the mean (average) as a substitute for the median (typical value). I doubt even the Volokh gang make $75K/year.
LOLcats has the advantage of easy merchandising opportunities. Unfortunately for you, Overkill-themed calendars aren’t likely to ever be much of a money earner.
“Gotta” does not need an apostrophe after it. Neither does “oughta,” as I’ve seen you do that to.
Radley
If you want money you should reorganize the layout of your ads. No one sees them where they are located, with the exception of the Amazon Ads on the Left Column! I barely notes the right column and top column google ads.
I have a political blog(In portuguese) that barely has 10000 hits per month and makes not much less money than you…
With your traffic you might be a candidate for the big time ad networks like FM Publishing. That is where the big time ad dollars come from.
Step 1: Add more pictures of cute cats saying funny things.
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit
Clearly, you need an earmark or two directed your way. Call your rep and get yourself some of that bailout money!
Start by switch from google ads to Project Wonderful…
They probably sell their own ads. It’s my understanding that Google AdSense isn’t really good for sites that really want to bring in a lot of money from their hits.
Radster:
1) Here’s a good link with a bunch of suggestions:
http://www.doshdosh.com/the-best-way-to-make-money-online/
2) As has been suggested, move most your ‘ads’ to the left, forcing us to look at them. Ads on the right side are just naturally ignored.
3) Make yourself THE place to go (the authority) for a topic (for you, that would be things like police raids, puppy-cide, police accountability, etc) and make a that a focus somehow at the top of your site …. leave the daily stories the way you have it, but maybe have a ‘hot link’ at the top with the ‘the latest puppy-cide stories’ or ‘the latest police raid’ stories so people (non-regulars) can jump right to that stuff.
4) This one’s maybe a bit more personal: a lot of your ads are things like political sites or books. I’m more of a tech toy junkie. I’m on Buy’com’s mailing list and get a daily email from them with good deals (and they’ve suckered me into at least 10 things :) ). If you had something like a ‘Buy.com deal of the day’, or similar type of ad … someone like me might be more willing to click through.
I have fewer unique visitors and pull in slightly more than you in Google ads, but way less than you in donations. A very high percentage of my Google ad revenue comes from one very popular page (Why is marijuana illegal?)
I think you could probably do a better job of incorporating the ad into your design. I decided I didn’t want ad revenue enough to go with a left column ad (no chance of the ad slowing down page load and I didn’t want to be that pushy). With it in the right column, people can ignore it (or even miss it entirely with a smaller window), but incorporating it in the design helps.
And yeah, that 75,000 figure sounds great and makes one think “hey, maybe I could actually make money and not just cover internet expenses,” but I doubt that it’s realistic in general, and particularly not for blogs in our fields.
From now on, I’m sending you all my left overs.
Just kidding. I’m too cheap even for that.
Pray tell does FF have such a plugin?
Adblock Plus
rob sama: fine with me. I’d rather have my tax dollars going to Radley than to a Bridge to Nowhere :)
Radley, I agree with people who have commented that the strongest theme of your site (law enforcement-related civil liberties) isn’t particularly commercializable. But, it might be worth rethinking the ads to at least focus more appropriately on your specific audience.
I don’t know how your ads are set up, but links to things that are particularly related to that might do well here. I know that links to books relating to police power would get me to click because that sort of stuff does end up in my amazon basket. I am sure you have a long list of books with that theme that should be regular selections on your amazon banner. Even books about general government growth, power, and abuse would be well received by your readers. I am thinking in terms of classics like Bastiat, or modern writers like James Bovard, Peter McWilliams, or Richard A. Epstein. Or, even more popular authors like John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano.
Similarly, I’ve been lucky not to need one, but I would probably click through on ads from lawyers who handle police abuse and injustice cases, just to see that there are some who do. To be honest, more than once I have read stories here and literally thought, “When these clowns have pulled their boots off the back of my neck and are hauling me in to pass the rest of the railroad job to the prosecutor, it sure would be nice to know the name of a reasonably local lawyer who handles this sort of case.” I can’t be the only one here who reads your posts and has a “there but for the grace of a criminal with a poor memory for addresses go I” moment.
My point is, your audience comes here generally to learn about a certain class of issues and maybe the advertising could be more focused.
In addition, google tends to generate a lot of content-specific ads that are really just comical, given the real context of the site. Half the ads on a raid-gone-wrong story will be for police training or police job hunt sites. So, your readers are looking at a story where the authorities busted down someone’s door and then killed him before discovering they were at the wrong place and then we look up and see a “wanna be a cop?” ad (some of them with pictures of the boys in their full SWAT, wannabe-ninja/soldier, raid gear). I just snicker.
Southpark explains the whole “making money on the internet” thingy here:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/165192/?tag=Butters
: )
I really think the nature of your audience is the problem. The add I saw today was regarding avoiding home forclosure. Even if that was on the left side there isn’t much chance of me clicking on that one. For me the most likely add that I would click on is the Amazon recommendation list which is already on the left.
Along the lines of comments #21 and #24, it’s your audience. However, I wouldn’t call libertarians “cheap”…instead I’d say “overwhelmingly responsible folk” (and contrarians to boot). Not the type of people who click on an ad for an impulse buy.
So…if I click on an ad at the end of reading your blog, is that helpful?
“‘Gotta’ does not need an apostrophe after it. Neither does “oughta,” as I’ve seen you do that to.”
Kevin, your (mis)use of the word “to” instead of “too” is a perfect example of “Murphry’s Law”–one will inevitably make a grammatical or spelling error when posting to correct such a mistake made by another.
The bloggers who make the most money tend to blog for money. That is obviously not your primary goal with this site.
As mentioned in other comments, this site’s contents as well as visitors are not highly “monetizable.”
Google Adsense, while popular, is far from the only way to monetize a website but tends to be the default ad service for sites that do not have a natural related service or product.
I have some blogs, but the blogs themselves are not set up to make much money directly. They DO feed other sites that make revenue.
Sites that rely on social media and/or regular readership ( subscribers) are tough to monetize, especially with contextual ads. Readers don’t really click on ads. But surfers do. Said surfers come from search traffic for the most part.
If you write well and enjoy writing, you can make money blogging. However, it might come from a subject you are not passionate about. Or it could come from a subject you ARE passionate about, as long as it can be monetized and you do the research.
You might find that people search for and buy “widgets” for example. Then you do basic keyword research and niche research. You find a niche that is popular and semi- competitive but doable. Maybe you decide to write an entire blog about how widgets work and reviews of said widgets. There are many companies who run affiliate programs for these widgets. They will pay you 50 bucks a sale. Some of these widgets are even “free” for your visitors. You start reviewing specific widgets, using affiliate links in your posts. Of course you optimize your blog titles and all that good stuff to rank in search. Then you go out and get 1000s of backlinks. You vary the anchor text but get some variation of your main keyword(s). You might even discretely buy a few links on authority or high pagerank sites.
You start getting search traffic for your keywords, which match your contextual, banner, and text ads perfectly. Your blog post about ” New Blue Widget Model XL3″ now has Adsense ads for “free blue widget model XL3″, ” compare blue widget XL3 prices,” and so on. Plus you also have a banner that leads to the most reputable online widget dealer that also pays high commissions. And your actual post has affiliate text links. The banner and text links also use cookies of 7-30 days or more. If the visitor clicks through and doesn’t buy anything that day but goes back later and buys- $$$. This works especially well for 2 major sites- think auctions for 1 and bookseller for the other.
Every time you write a new post you add new content to your site and more keywords for people to find your site. You get deep links to every post, then you also link internally to previous or related posts. All with the proper text off course- none of that “click here” or ” see this post I wrote before” nonsense.
That’s one way to do it anyway.
Some of the bigger social sites and just really well known blogs make money in private ads. Also a lot of the big money earners are really not monetized well at all or even good for monetizing. They get by on sheer volume. For example, LOLcat and other blogs really don’t make much money at all considering how popular and well known they are. There are blogs and networks no one has ever heard of that make more money on a fraction of the traffic.
I tend to agree with those calling for a new template. While this one is tried and true, if you want to push ad revenue, you have to start thinking less like a blogging pundit and more like a media maven.
At least in firefox, there’s a gap between the ads on the top of the page and the beginning of the content. You end up with a whitespace gap at the top of the page which makes the ads fairly easy to ignore.
You should test using inline advertising which highlights some key words for you. When a reader mouses over the word, it pops up advertising links. I personally hate them but the proof tends to be in the results of your testing.
The reason people suggest moving ad copy to the left is simply an old-school layout concept. In the west, the eye reads from left to right. As long as you have more than one line of text on the page, the eye has to come back to the left. If you have longer content that finishes further down than your general ad copy goes, you end up with unused white space on either side. This happens quite a bit in content with comments. In the ‘comment’ template, throw in an ad block at the bottom of the comments.
Create a new navigation banner with drop-down menus for your site features. The navigation you have for site features takes up quite a bit of good real estate on the page. By condensing these elements, you free up some additional space….
While this is true there is also the number of blogs in the sample to consider. For example, if there are 1,000 blogs then to get an average of $75,000/year you’ll need some really, really big earners if most are pulling in a few thousand a year or less.
Also, they may not have a representative sample of blogs. If they pick one’s people know about, by-and-large, then they may very well be over-sampling large blogs and thus also oversampling blogs with nice little incomes.
Damn, only 3 hours too late on making the first South Park internet money joke. Well played ZappaCrappa. Well played.
I’ll second the motion for Project Wonderful, if only because then I could have an ad on your page… maybe… if you let me :)
Then again, my marketing budget probably wouldn’t allow it.
Considering your work revealing constitutional abuses, and the twisting and abuse of the law by police and prosecutors, something NO ONE else is doing, it doesn’t seem right that you are not raking in the cash. I just can’t believe traditional media hasn’t jumped on some of the things you reveal in here.
Well…if you’re too successful…this can happen:
God I love Southpark : )
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/165196/
I personally love the site just the way it is: without intrusive, annoying, content belittling advertisements. Of course, I wouldn’t blame you for adding ads if you needed (or even wanted) the money, but I like it just the way it is.
KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
There ya go…75K, in just a single web visit.
Fuzzy Math, I think they call it.
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