Isn’t that too little to live on?

Steve Gilliard writes:

Blogs make money and are cheap to run, compared to what came before. By going small and doing most of the work yourself, you can make money. The real hero in this is not any blogger, but Henry Copeland of Blogads. The first truly honest ad broker. I don’t think Kos, Atrios or Jerome Armstrong would disagree. Copeland makes blogs possible, along with generous readers. Those two make this more than the hobby of the frustrated.

We hate to disagree, but frankly that’s just a bit much. More than a bit really. How many blogs make real money? It’s great for their respective owners if DailyKos, Atrios or MyDD make money, but are there more than 10 blogs out there that bring any kind of meaningful revenue stream? (Let’s define meaninngful as anything that works out to more than minimum wage once the expenses are paid.)

According to Blogads, the average blogger makes $50/month. We don’t know if Henry is the first honest ad broker out there, but we’d wager that the big blogs who do make money could easily afford to work out the ad selling part of their business without him. Blogads certainly does make it possible for small time bloggers to raise some money — but those blogs that do make money are not the ones “going small” — they’re the ones who have gone big. Good for them — but Blogads deserves little of the credit for that.

 

Comments: 7

 
 
 

You’re just jealous because your zero blogads and no donation button are not that lucrative.

 
 

By going small and doing most of the work yourself, you can make money.

Or, conversely, by going small and doing most of the work yourself, you can NOT make $50 a month. It’s pretty much all the same in the end, except that the second way you don’t have to worry about being somehow obliged to advertisers.

 
 

I see Frederick is going for hottest young conservative writer on the web. Too bad his wife is cuckolding him with her father.

 
 

I think Gilliard’s logic is that Blogads allows big, very high bandwidth blogs to break even, rather than costing their writers $many in hosting bills. If my blog were costing me $10K a year, I’d probably stop writing it unless I could bring in something similar from ad revenue…

 
 

Hey, someone should tell Dick Cheney about this! You add the millions of bloggers to all the folks on e-bay, and the Bush administration has created millions of jobs!

 
 

Although I frequently agree with him, I must say I find Gilliard to be more than a little self-absorbed, so this particular blog statement is not terribly surprising coming from him.

 
 

$50/month is higher than the average salary on Earth.

 
 

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