This is Tech

Curious what your blog traffic is worth in advertising dollars? Pay per click or impression based advertising takes a lot of visitors to add up. Nic Duquette at Snarksmith.com has a nice analysis of what it takes to have a profitable weblog.

What Your Blog Is Worth: “What’s Your Blog Worth? Converting Your Livejournal Into Cold, Hard Cash
by Nic Duquette

If you’re reading this essay, you probably have an Internet connection, and if you have an Internet connection, you probably have a weblog. We will therefore dispose with the formality of defining what a blog is for technological neophytes and proceed directly to the question that has been on your mind since the very first day when you wrote that the music accompanying your frowny emoticon and paragraph about your significant other was Tom Waits — can you make money doing this? Maybe even enough to quit your job?

Everybody wants to be paid to blog, even people who make obscene amounts of money in jobs that are equally or even more pleasurable pursuits than lonely HTML opining. However, not everybody could afford to quit work and blog full time; since most bloggers read other blogs solely while they’re at work and supposed to be doing something else, there’s an economic categorical imperative against everybody quitting work to blog, at least until linking becomes an informal currency, which is actually just a small cultural leap away.

So the natural question becomes: Do you have enough readership to attract advertising, and if you do, is it enough to live on? To answer this question, I looked at the avertising rates on Blogads, a blog advertising collective used by sites of very diverse voices and readership. From this page I obtained three-month advertising rates, number of currently running ads, and ad prices for the entire Blogads family. I then converted the three-month rates times the number of ads for each site at each price level into one annualized number per site. I also took the pageviews and multiplied them times 91 times 5/7, which should give approximately the number of pageviews the site gets on a weekday. (If the site gets significant traffic on weekends, this number will be exaggerated — but hey, close enough for blog work. If you want to be really accurate, multiply your weekly traffic numbers by 5/7.) I plotted this estimated annual revenue against estimated weekday pageviews and got the following chart:”

For Nic’s full analysis, check out his full post at www.snarksmith.com/essays/blogcash.html.

(Via SnarkSmith.)