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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."
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
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
Not even to government?
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.