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."
You just had to link to him on Slashdot, didn't you. Come on, he's making enough already ;)
'Nuff said.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
is that his blog doesn't even render properly in my browser (Firefox, Unbuntu). Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen. Spew out your opinion and throw internet standards to the wind... it's all okay because you've got a big AdSense cheque coming your way.
Google's terms of service explicitly forbit Adsense members from revealing details about how much they make.
Adsense is great, and those figures are probably accurate. But if Google finds out this person broke the TOS, they might just take those payments away.
...I read this, and I swear, I half expected 'ol Roland to have submitted it...
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
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.
Honestly what on earth is with this 'blogging' craze? I refuse to even acknowledge 'blog' as a legitimate term. Web log perhaps, and I'm barely into my twenties! These web loggers seem to think they have stumbled onto some hertoforth undiscovered treasure -- compensated authorship! Wow, it turns out that a very small percentage of 'bloggers' have the writing ability to generate income doing said activity. Color me serpryzed. Oooh. I just invented a word. Serpryzed. I'm going to go append this to my meta-blog about blogging with a headline stolen from an obscure band from my assumed hometown.
I'm missing the part in his blog post where he speaks about earning $10,000 - $20,000. He only talks about a big paycheck. Only in the comments is this figure mentioned. So I wonder where exactly the figure's coming from...
A blog about how bloggers can get rich, gets him get rich from blogging.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
they read blogs, they click on ads. they probably buy herbal v1agra and L@@K at RARE! ebay auctions too.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The strategy has changed. 10 years ago, if someone wanted to talk about tv shows, they might have started a website called TvTome, and let members contribute, and it was a real community. You would not believe how many knowlegable star trek fans are out there, same goes for quantum leap. These people wrote some great insightful episode summaries, which had great attention to the shows history, philosophical meanings, and excitement. While I did not see them all, I bet there was a nice battlestar gallactica section. Those posts are gone.
Then someone got the idea to start advertising, and nothing has been the same since.
Now websites have a plan, get members to contribute for free, and take those contributations and make money. Isn't that crooked? There is no "thanks", no respect.
In the case of TvTome, cnet came and purchased them for a cool $5 million dollars. The owner of TvTome did not care about his community anymore, he wanted the money. And all the posts, everything the community contributed was lost. How many people want to put the effort into rebuilding what they already made?
I'll give another example. AVS forums is a place where people talk high end projectors and plasma televisions and the such. The owner sells projectors, and made a new rule, only MSRP prices can be quoted. Yet, if it was not for the 100 or so very insightful members who offer great advice, his forum would be nothing, meaningless. People go to his forum because there is a smart community there that is willing to offer good advice. Meanwhile, the owner capitalizes off this and makes a profit. Seems to me, the people who should be making a profit are the ones giving their free advice and building the community.
And then there is one DVD website where the admins went bezerk. They lost their minds. They started banning people left and right, people whos posts are still there and posts that are valuable. Why were these people banned? Your guess is as good as mine, I think one admin said he banned a guy because he had a link to amazon, and did not use the forums link to amazon which generates some money for the forum.
I love the idea of a community, where people exchange their knowledge and friendship. I hate the idea of 1 person owning these communities and getting rich off the free work and contributations of the members.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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.
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
ahahahahaha! what do you call slashdotting? urinating?
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.
It's things like this that prove that humanity as we know it is getting increasingly asinine. (As if that weren't already fucking apparent.) Blogging is the most redundant form of emo droning on the net.
Meh.
He already posted a new blog regarding this Slashdot in which he clarifies some issues, misunderstandings and other things.
b logger-slashdotted/
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/07/17/pro
I have never, and learned to mentally block out ads years ago before adsense existed probably like many of you here. Now, you might say that average joe six pack hasn't learnt this skill yet and might click through, but who is average joe six pack these days.
For example, I have quite a few friends who never used a computer in their lives until the late 90's. I'd see them confused by webpage layouts, clicking ok and cancel on boxes which obviously are ads, but they'd see it as a functional part of the page. In not too short a time, they were surfing 'like pros' in that they'd never click any ads and I could tell they had just learned to mentally ignore them. Now these guys are still highly ignorant on computers in general (in dealing with software/hardware issues, spyware, adware etc). I've helped them with that with ff, and all the other tools etc. But with browsing with ads they just picked that up on their own. I didn't have to teach them how to filter out ads. It seems pretty much anyone, computer literate or not, will soon enough learn to filter ads all on their own.
So who's joe sixpack these days? Our moms and dads? If so, I wonder as this generation gets older and the previous generation passes on, and an even more tech savvy generation comes online, how will any of these ad models sustain themselves.
Thanks to the dot-com days these people don't have day jobs anymore. Really these scams have great appeal to the unemployed, who have extra time, are desperate, and feel like they have less to lose. And although its easy to make fun of "the losers," they're not paying income taxes or into social security, so we're all losing out.
...when I was searching for a product, and the ad was relevant and useful to me, and offered a good deal on the product. Why not?
AdWords can even be _more_ relevant than the main search results if you are in a small European country; the main search results can tend to be from USA sellers that won't sell to you anyway, while the AdWords are targetted, from local sellers who will...
All I see is a bunch of wannabe critics who obviously ooze with jealousy because they've never been able to achieve this level of success outside of their mere rantings they contribute to the comments section of Slashdot. Of course some of those who are posting such harsh criticisms are probably guilty of nothing but ignorance because they have yet to figure out how to do what many are doing... Personally, I believe the opportunities that come along with ads on blogs and websites are a win-win situation. Advertisers like them, Publishers like them and Uncle Sam likes them - why shouldn't you? And even if you don't, no one is forcing you to click. Sheesh! Besides WHAT are ya'all complaining about? At least the folks making money from blogging or a variety of other internet based avenues are helping support the millions of people on welfare regardless of what part of the world they are in. Helps keep YOUR taxes lower, don'cha think? Got things to say? Get a Blog! Perhaps people will like you well enough to click on you too! Iggy
Because we can all be an Iggert sometimes!