Simon’s Blog

A few days ago, I wrote about the popularity of almost all blogs, or rather the lack of popularity. In that post, I gave some rough ways that a blog might be valued from an investment perspective - you certainly need more than a million visitors a week to be valued by investors in the single digit millions of dollars.

However, how a VC values you isn’t the only measure of value. What about good old-fashioned revenues? One way to monetize visitor volume from a blog is via advertising. The easiest way to get advertising on your blog is by using the advertising platform provided by one of the big search engine companies, such as Google or Yahoo.

So, what kind of revenues can you expect? It’s highly dependent on the kind of web-site you have. If your site has the kind of content where people who visit are looking to buy things, you will do better; if you don’t you will do worse. However, for blogs that: a) have visitors that want to buy stuff; b) have community particiaption through comments (which tends to mean multiple of page views per unique visitor, and therefore per ad click); and c) show lots of ads on each page, a rough estimate seems to be: for every three hundred and a bit page views your get, you earn one dollar in ad revenue.

So, let’s say you wanted to earn an “average” salary from your blog, say around $40,000 per year. That means you’d need to be seeing between 30,000 and 40,000 page views per day. There aren’t many bloggers in the world that see those kind of page views. And what if you wanted to earn an “good” salary from ads e.g. the kind of money you might make as part of the management team in a VC-backed start-up, say around $200,000 a year. Then you’d need to be seeing over 180,000 page views per day on your blog. There’s really only a handful of bloggers in the world that see those kind of numbers. And if you want to make a million a year, you need a million page views per day. Blogs seeing those kind of levels of page views are truly exceptional - Engadget is the only blog I can think of off the top of my head, that’s seeing numbers like that.

So, the bottom line is - whichever way you cut it, despite all the hype around blogging, very few people are making any money from it.

In my previous post on value, I valued this blog at $1600 from a VC investment perspective, and said I better get back to work From the ad revenue perspective, this blog could potentially generate $800 per year if I put ads on it… so at the risk of repeating myself… it’s time to get back work!