Comments on: Blogging For Dollars

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 15:29:47 +0000

Mark,

You’re getting over 20,000 visits a day & don’t have AdSense running?!?! I’ll pay you to let me run my AdSense account over there.

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 18:25:00 +0000

Another factor to consider is that the people who blog for profit are probably weighted toward the more active end of the blog spectrum. I doubt that people who set up a blog, make a few posts here and there are the ones that are likely to make money.

By: Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 23:19:30 +0000

Hi John! We tried affiliate ads for a robot company and a software company. We might tgry Google Adwords. I'm thinking it might be good to keep boing boing as an ad-free zone, and have a couple of spin off blogs that are much more focused, and then have ads on those.

You've got a great blog, by the way! It's on my RRS list now.

By: John Battelle

John Battelle — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 19:57:46 +0000

I’m curious, Mark – what did you try? Adsense? Overture? Were the resulting listings too random, given the eclectic nature of your postings? Or did it take too much space on the site? Or something else? A readership of 20K a day is extraordinary. Not that you would or should, but I am sure if you really pushed – say got a sales person and/or joined the right ad network, you could make ads work. Then, of course, you’d be seen as selling out, or at the very least trying to hard. And you’d lose all your readers. Sigh. No easy way to make a buck.

By: Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 19:09:03 +0000

That seems high to me. I imagine a lot of bloggers have tried ads, however, but have learned they aren't a good way to make even pocket change, and so they yanked them. Boing Boing gets close to 20,000 visitors a day (which is puny by most commercial site standards, but probaby above average for blogs) and my ad experiments there have been failures. The exception is house ads. Cory and I do pretty well plugging our own books on Boing Boing.

By: Richard Evans Lee

Richard Evans Lee — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:43:46 +0000

Since almost 40% are on Blogspot probably some people are running Google's ads who answered no.

While I answered the survey I almost didn't. It seemed pretty sloppy and probably had a worthless sample. (Used to be in market research many, many years ago.)

By: mary hodder

mary hodder — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 17:45:18 +0000

I agree the study and conclusions could be better, but I believe much more than 13% of the blogs I read carry ads because they are so easy to implement now. Many blogs don’t have them on the front page, but hit a permalink, and find them attached to anything below the top. Interesting stuff, though.