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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."
Since this has been posted to /., is everyone looking at his blogs clicking on a adword? If so his check next month might be even larger. Perhaps that would constitute another definition of the /. effect.
Well, I think we earned about $600 last year from that one :-(
It's not helped by the abysmal state of the dollar-pound, nor by the fact that Google pays with dollar checks and the bank takes a huge cut along the way.
Adsense gives us hardly any guidance as to what fees we get. It seems like Google takes a large cut. We're looking at replacing it with a commission junction advert slot.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Wait a second... his site gets a piddling 3000 page views a day (/. gave it that many in the last hour, in the middle of the night!), and he claims to be making big bucks?
WTF?
Technorati has 16 links in the last three days (many of them this current story), which is nice, but not exactly Boingboing, is it? Alexa has it at a nice, but not spectacular, rank of 32,764 (compare to TalkingPointsMemo's rank of 19,893 or Juan Cole's 19,776), and it barely shows up on Daypop. I don't see where the money comes from with those types of numbers.
Okay, I have to answer- with a shameless plug and a short story.
I run a site called InsideWoodland.com (in my sig). So far I've written about 70 stories. Each one takes me about 8 hours to do- with photos, interview, etc. This is a major chunk of my free time.
This is my main 'hobby', I spend a lot of time working on it, and a lot of time talking about it. Everyone I talk to wants to know why I am doing it, and most importantly, 'how much money do you make.' I haven't made a single dime. Monetary rewards were never my focus. (Although I do have an area where people can advertise, but nobody has done it yet, and I don't really push it.)
My real reward is just the knowledge that people really do read my stories, and look at my pictures. AND, I get to make other people 'famous' along the way.
The only people who have really understood this yet, were the gang-banger types that I met at low-rider car show while doing a story.
While a guy is telling me that he has devoted the last 4 years of his life, and $50,000 into his car- he has no problem understanding that I am doing something just because I enjoy it. But sadly, most 'normal' people just think I am a nut for not trying to make money.
I have looked into Adsense, but my traffic is to small since the website is tightly targeted (people in my small town). And, I don't like the way the ads look.
My only real goal is to somehow make a little bit of money to pay for my hosting fees. And if I paid for my current hosting fees, the first thing I would do is upgrade my hosting plan, to make the site perform better- even if it did end up costing me more money.
So yes, there are people out there who set up websites just for fun, and not for the money. So if this is a good thing, why do so many people tell me I am stupid for doing it?
No reason to lie.