Slashdot Mirror
Rise of the Professional Blogger
Victor Cheng writes "Robert Scoble today points to a blogger who is claiming he earns between $10,000 and $20,000 per month via Google Adsense." From the article: "The cheque was the biggest cheque I've ever held onto (well the biggest I've held onto that has my name on it). The amazing thing is that in the month of May I earned more than I earned in a whole year in 2003 from a 'real job' (of course at the time I was only working a 3 day week while I studied part time) and well over half as much as I earned from Adsense in the whole of 2004."
He does what always pays best in a new market: He shows a way to make money.
The spammers who make the most are those who sell spamming tools. The people who earned the most with the web in its early days were the ones who built the tools to make websites. The bloggers who make the most are those who blog about making money. The podcasters who will make the most will be the ones who tell others how to make money podcasting.
He's a pro-blogger blogging about making money with blogging. He's right on the money and tells you to do something else, because if you started to blog about problogging, you would start to cut in on his action.
Money, money, money...
What in the world ever happened to building a web site to help people, to spread information, and to build a "community." Even more so, when did money become the primary goal of a web structure?
For example, slashdot was built for fun and information spread first. Only after it became successful did it start making lots of money. Now people do just the opposite... they design the web site for money first and if the site turns out to be useful, then it's an accident.
In college, I designed the Moan and Groan Page (now very dead) where people could bitch about their hardware. It was the hardware/software explosion time and all the major players were pushing a ton of junk into the marketplace. People could search my site before they purchased anything. I got threatened my tons of companies... and lawyers who used the site came to my defense. The hosting was donated, etc. Then I started my real life (job, family) and had to leave it all behind.
Once I established all of that, I returned to the web to start another project. What a difference those few years made. I wanted to start a similar site helping people with computer problems and tech-recipes.com was born. No thrills, no fluff, no pop-ups... just helpful computer hints. We make enough money from google to pay our server costs... nothing more.
Despite the fact that we just provide raw information, we have never developed a huge community around us. Sure we receive a ton of hits from the search engines, but I miss that feeling of having tons of users helping and supporting each other.
Now I have to worry about everybody stealing my information and slapping their ads all over it...
What a difference a few years make...
AC