There’s (NOT) Gold In Them Hills – The Challenge of Blogging for Dollars

Author: greg

5 Jan

Guy Kawasaki provides us with some insight into his first year blogging:

2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day.

262 posts generated 6,961 comments and 1,937 trackbacks. That’s 25 comments/post and 7 trackbacks/post.

21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz.

Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, butI’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float…)

How to Change the World: A Review of My First Year of Blogging

Over the past year, when asked why the SocialRoots Marketplace was needed, I’ve often used Guy Kawasaki as a prime example of just what’s wrong with our advertising-only centric view of social media monetization. Consider Guy’s example: a regularly udated, top 50 blog with significant traffic by a well know speaker and author squeezes out a slim $280 a month. Sounds lovely, no? Sign me up.

Some will be quick to point out that many people are able to monetize their online publications with less traffic and notoriety. I might counter that I am not interested in writing about home theatre, HDTV, mortgages, or other gadgets, but that would just be me making a point.

Chris Anderson points out on his Long Tail Blog:

Just another reminder that the reason to be a Long Tail producer is not direct revenues. Instead, it’s exactly what Guy uses it for: marketing for his books, VC firm, speeches and consulting. For which he’s exceedingly well paid. Indirect revenues rule!

The Long Tail: Don’t quit your day job

Lead generation and referals are definitely another viable option for extracting value from your personal publication. Of course, we’re not all consultants either, but it’s a step in the right direction.

If all goes well, we’ll share another interesting model with the world in the next couple of months.

technorati tags:long+tail, chris+anderson, guy+kawasaki, blogging, monetization

Filed under: Long Tail, Social Roots

5 Responses for "There’s (NOT) Gold In Them Hills – The Challenge of Blogging for Dollars"

BlogKits Performance Marketing Network Blog » Google Adsense A Huge Failure For Guy Kawaski’s Blog January 5th, 2007 at 12:30 pm 1
[...] More coverage here, here, here, and here. [...]
Jim Kukral January 5th, 2007 at 1:18 pm 2
Sorry, but Guy could have both indirect revenue, and direct. Assuming he would have tried harder than just throwing an Adsense block willy nilly on his site. But, again, he didn’t really need the extra income because he makes money through blogging passively.

But now with Federated Media, I estimate he’ll make between $50-$100k/year now from his blog traffic. Why use Adsense if you have that much traffic? Someone please tell me. :P)
greg January 5th, 2007 at 4:29 pm 3
No doubt Guy could have monetized his publication – I think the point I want to make, though, is that it’s easy to NOT. Even beyond that, if someone does go the route of doing their own sponsorship sales, etc, they must make a much different kind of committment than most people are accustomed to.

Federated is still picky with who they’ll represent.. a group that few of us qualify for still.
Jim Kukral January 5th, 2007 at 4:59 pm 4
Greg,

Yeah, FM is picky, they represent the 1% of the 1% of high traffic blogs out there in my estimation.
Vic January 5th, 2007 at 7:05 pm 5
I take indirect revenue as a modern day Trojan horse. People are focusing on the obvious or are searching for ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ may be. The primary content is the obvious physical horse when in actuality, the masses are vulnerable to the less than obvious. This is Google’s bread and butter.