On the 10th anniversary of blogging, Digital Journal showcases the top money-makers in the blogosphere. Want to earn $5,600 a month from home? Post silly captions on top of cat photos.
Digital Journal — It’s hard to believe a site rife with anonymous comments submitted by readers could be profitable. It’s even harder to figure out what kind of advertisers would be drawn to the blog, Overheard in New York. But $8,100 a month (all numbers US) in ad revenue doesn’t lie, and neither do impressive stats of 6 million monthly pageviews. Welcome to blogging success stories where online journals emerge from its oft-ridiculed past to become small-business models of profitability. These sites are some of the big players in the biz, as outlined in a round-up by BusinessWeek.
When New York resident Morgan Friedman began Overheard in 2003, he didn’t expect the blog to lead to a published book and four offshoot blogs (for example, Overheard at the Beach). Now his eavesdropping-inspired blog charges $350 a week for small ads and $6,000 a week for Flash ads placed in a prime space. This is no small hobby for Friedman. As he told Business Week:I’ve always approached it more as a community than a business. I want to make enough so we can invest more to grow.
It’s a statement eons ahead of what John Barger wrote in the first-ever blog entry on Dec. 23, 1997:I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis.
And so blogging was born out of the burning necessity to create an online diary, without a journalistic mission to find stories the mainstream press miss. But simply posting journal entries wasn’t enough for the more adventerous bloggers in the world; they wanted to provide content no one else was offering, and create discussions where people could react to issues that affected them on a personal level.
Today, stay-at-home bloggers can accomplish all that while also earning hefty paycheques. There’s Peter Cashmore of trend-watcher Mashable.com, taking home $166,000 a month in ad revenue; there’s Jason Kottke with his self-named blog on design, which earns him 5,300 a month; and any tech lover should be well-acquainted with BoingBoing.net, along with 2.6 million other visitors every month. Known as an irreverent source of tech and science news, BoingBoing rakes in $1 million in annual ad sales. What’s that I hear, the sound of magazine publisher’ jaws hitting the floor?
Some successful blogs start as jokes. Software developer Eric Nakagawa began his blog of cat photos and captions simply as an amusing pastime, but soon visitors flooded the site and traffic doubled each month since it began in January 2007. Nakagawa soon allowed users to post their own photos and captions, attracting 500,000 pageviews a day. Nakagawa recently explained:We basically have a playground where people keep coming to play, so we’re trying to create new games all the time.
Then there are the money-makers who’ve become the Internet’s darling scribes. Winning the most attention is PerezHilton.com, home of the flamboyant celeb basher who often posts 24 entries a day. The blog garners four million views daily (yes, daily) and pulls in $111,000 in ad revenue monthly. All this from alerting us Sharon Stone’s latest crush?
Writing on more weightier matters is the impressively popular TechCrunch. Ideal for Netizens closely observing Web 2.0 start-ups and trends, TechCrunch generates $200,000 a month in ad and job board sales. TechCrunch’s founder Michael Arrington explains the blog’s appeal to media buyers:
Our advertisers are people who want to reach a tech audience and an early-adopter audience.
Ask any smart blogger how to grow and the answer will inevitably be, “Spread far and wide.” It’s a tactic that worked wonderfully for Internet phenoms like Craigslist, so it’s only prudent that blogs follow suit. One of the more successful networks in this small-biz sector is Gothamist, a collection of 14 city-specific sites such as Torontoist, Seattlest and Shanghaiist. With estimated monthly revenues of $250,000, the Gothamist model is surely one to emulate for city-specific blogs, although it’s a tough competitor to beat: From experience, I’ve found Torontoist to be well-written and investigative, often uncovering stories before newspaper beat reporters get around to covering them.
Business majors might be wondering how to replicate what these profitable blogs do, especially in terms of attracting millions of viewers. But the funny thing about blogs is there’s no quick formula for profitability; of the 96 million blogs on the Web, only a handful are making enough money to keep the publisher from working a day job.
All these blogs, and many others worth bookmarking, do share several common features: they provide content their niche readership wants to view, delivered instantly and supplemented with cheeky insight and analysis; they create a strong bond between audience and creator; and, most importantly, they offer alternative viewpoints to what’s presented on TV or in print. And if a good blog’s enduring appeal can give Web developers the financial freedom to focus more intensely on updating their sites, it’s a win-win situation for everyone.
