That was my point - you misread the above post when you made your calculation:
Bloggers depend on people clicking on ads to generate revenue. Ad are priced at whatever someone bids on. So if someone wants say a computer ad, they may pay $15.00 a click. If someone wants an ad for toenail clippers he may pay only 2¢ per click.
I’m gonna over simplify this to show you. So lets say you get half of what the people pay per click. (In real life you get MUCH less)
So Joe Smith has a computer blog. 100 people read it and 10 people click on the computer ad. 10 clicks X $15.00 = $150.00 of which you get half for having the ad on your blog. Or you get $75.00. Great money.
Now Joe Schmoe has 50,000 people read his blog and 5,000 click. But his ad only pays 2¢ of which he gets half.
5,000 x.02 = 100.00 of which he gets half or $50.00
So Joe Schmoe gets a higher audience, but because his subject is less competitive, his ads are worth less, so even though his audienc is 49,900 MORE he gets LESS money.
So it’s not only how you write but WHAT you’re writing about and how much people are willing to pay for the ads and IF they click on the ads.
And in my example half is WAY too much. You may get less than 1% of the ad revenue.
On the other hand some people like W Bruce Cameron, who ran what was a blog before such things existed proved popular enough to make books out of their blogs, (in his case he wrote “8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter” which was sold to TV)
So blogging became a way for him to advance a career and gain exposure.
Keep in mind that blog success, like almost everything else on the internet follows the power law distribution so the top 0.01% of blogs are making a lot of money and the other 99.99% is making peanuts. Sure, Perez Hilton has hit the jackpot but for every Perez Hilton, there’s 1000 wanna bes who tried to make it big and never succeeded.
Incidentally those of you who are interested here is a presentationby Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, about how Google’s ad auction works in setting the rates per click. It’s quite ingenious in using auction theory and game theory to give incentives to advertisers to improve the quality of ads and also be truthful when they are bidding for the ads. Not surprising since Varian is a leading microeconomist but it says something for Google that they were smart enough to hire him and then actually use his ideas.
[quote=“Lantern, post:4, topic:495776”]
This WSJ article from Jan 2008 gives a few details; it mentions an Australian blogger called Darren Rowse who made 250,000 in 2007 from ProBlogger which is about professional blogging./QUOTE]
There’s something kind of ironic about someone who appears to be one of the highest paid bloggers in the world, who happens to get paid by telling others how they can make money by being a professional blogger. Isn’t this kind of like those get-rich-quick schemes that tell you you can get rich quick if you start a business that sells information telling others how they can start their own get-rich-quick schemes?
Yes there is a whiff of the Ponzi with blogs which blog about professional blogging. But these blogs offer a lot of good advice for free and you don’t have to pay to start blogging. That is what makes blogging almost unique within business entrepreneurship: the start-up costs are practically zero.
Of course this means that there are a vast number of blogs out there which don't make any money but that is a bit misleading since the vast majority of blogs are vanity sites which fizzle out after a few months anyway. Among serious bloggers who treat it like a business and are constantly improving and adjusting their blogs as suggested by **Sam Stone**, I wouldn't be surprised if the success ratio is quite decent. Certainly his experience is an interesting data point which suggests that making money with good content is perhaps not that difficult.I think it really depends on what you consider to be ‘making money’. I think it’s probably quite easy to work your way up to making a few hundred dollars a month, and possible to make a thousand or two if you’re willing to work at it as hard as you would any other job.
But the dilemma is that the kind of person who can write well, who can come up with interesting themes or do web design, who can manage a business, and who has something interesting to say, will most likely make more money doing something else. The kind of people who are highly successful at blogging are more likely to be the kind of people who would be highly successful at many other things.
If you look at the top ranks of bloggers, they tend to be people with advanced degrees, or with major industry connections, or who are acknowledged experts in the field they blog about, or who have a real gift for writing. Many of the bloggers I follow are college professors or working scientists.
If you’re someone who doesn’t know what to talk about, and you’re looking for an easy way to make a living, you’re unlikely to find it as a blogger. The bloggers I know who make money are damned near workaholics. They blog ALL the time. They read several books a week. Every time a new social web site comes along, they figure out how to get their blog noticed on it (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc). They’re constantly running analysis programs to figure out where their audience is coming from so they can target that audience better. They diligently maintain their blogs for comment spam, abusive behavior, and the like. It gets tiring.
Possibly in the long run the biggest professional blogging opportunities will come not from standalone blogs but PR blogs started by corporations, politicians, celebrities etc. Especially because conventional advertising is becoming less effective as consumers find ways to avoid it or tune it out.
These kind of PR blogs already exist but most of them are pretty ordinary; they aren't updated frequently and the content is anyway quite bland. In the future there will be a demand for blogs that make an impact and create a loyal reader base like the best regular blogs. And marketing and PR departments will look for people who understand the medium and know how to work the Web.