Rise of the Professional Blogger 231
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."
Not a smart thing to talk about... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Now I'm curious (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:*Cough*RolandPiquepaille*Cough* (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of us (I, for example) wouldn't mind it so much if Taco came out and said that the stories are sponsored (not by the subjects of the stories, mind you, just by the blogger). Of course, if that happened, others would infer via slippery slope that more links would be thus sponsored; they would probably get pissed and stop reading Slashdot.
So instead, management acts as though nothing's going on, and we all grumble some, but largely nothing happens. Besides, we have bigger fish to fry (the usual suspects).
Live and learn ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [cj.com].
Rich.
Numbers Game (Score:5, Interesting)
WTF?
Technorati has 16 links in the last three days [technorati.com] (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 [daypop.com]. I don't see where the money comes from with those types of numbers.
Re:On logging webs. (Score:2, Interesting)
The kind of self-indulgent bullshit [xanga.com], pathetic emo ramblings [xanga.com], and general hollow angst [xanga.com] that was usually safely confined within Diaries and Journals are now being broadcast to everyone with Webernet access.
But that's not even the worst part. Here's an excerpt from someone's Xanga blog that I happen to know: "He said please let me give you a ride home with tears pouring from his eyes and I said no no no and ran the other way crying as I am still right now just remembering what happened. So I started to walk away looking back every once in a while hoping, praying he would come driving back to me. Picking me up saying that my world will be a little easier. And he never came and never came and never came. Which made me cry even harder."
She just exposed the long-kept secret that women are manipulative drama queens... on the blog that her boyfriend reads... that his friends read... and that his parents read!
If someone would like to help form some kind of terrorist organization (more COBRA less Al Queda) to rid the world of Blogs, and hell Reality TV while we're at it, please contact me.
Re:On logging webs. (Score:2, Interesting)
I see a lot of similarities with blogging. Taking a sample (link to some story), and throw in some bullshit (most blogs don't really have a message).
That said, I do read some blogs sometimes. But those that I read try to be funny, silly, entertaining.
He already blogged about being slashdotted (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/07/17/pro
Has anyone here ever clicked an adsense ad? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:And now he gets even more money... (Score:4, Interesting)
I run a site called InsideWoodland.com (in my sig). So far I've written about 70 stories. Each one takes me about 8 hours to do- with photos, interview, etc. This is a major chunk of my free time.
This is my main 'hobby', I spend a lot of time working on it, and a lot of time talking about it. Everyone I talk to wants to know why I am doing it, and most importantly, 'how much money do you make.' I haven't made a single dime. Monetary rewards were never my focus. (Although I do have an area where people can advertise, but nobody has done it yet, and I don't really push it.)
My real reward is just the knowledge that people really do read my stories, and look at my pictures. AND, I get to make other people 'famous' along the way.
The only people who have really understood this yet, were the gang-banger types that I met at low-rider car show while doing a story.
While a guy is telling me that he has devoted the last 4 years of his life, and $50,000 into his car- he has no problem understanding that I am doing something just because I enjoy it. But sadly, most 'normal' people just think I am a nut for not trying to make money.
I have looked into Adsense, but my traffic is to small since the website is tightly targeted (people in my small town). And, I don't like the way the ads look.
My only real goal is to somehow make a little bit of money to pay for my hosting fees. And if I paid for my current hosting fees, the first thing I would do is upgrade my hosting plan, to make the site perform better- even if it did end up costing me more money.
So yes, there are people out there who set up websites just for fun, and not for the money. So if this is a good thing, why do so many people tell me I am stupid for doing it?
Yes, and I've bought from the advertiser (Score:3, Interesting)
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...