December 31, 2003
Christopher L. Filkins
With the increasing popularity of blogs many of the more popular sites are beginning to draw such huge bandwidth that they are becoming financial drains on their owners. Andrew Sullivan, among others, recently ran a fund raising drive. Advertisements are becoming more and more ubiquitious across the blogosphere. Its darn near impossible these days to find a highly trafficked site which doesn't have some obvious revenue stream in place to pay the bills.
Looking out at the new year I can see myself spending a good $2,000 on the infrastructure for my "hobby". I'm thinking about running a fund raising drive to help defray the growing costs of moving 100gb per month. Needless to say it is a daunting prospect to think I may be priced out of doing what I love.
How do you manage your costs? If what you did became very popular would you foot the bill or simply stop writing? Will writing in the blogosphere become too expensive as the popularity of the blogosphere grows?
Posted by filchyboy at December 31, 2003 11:48 AM
I hate to admit it but advertising is the key, it’s not liked by everyone but if you can write a good blog you can usually writing a good affiliate site. I started about two months ago on an affiliate blog to support my main passion, The Blog Herald, and have made enough to pay for hosting for the entire year, mind you I do hosting on the cheap, unlimited domains and 5GB bandwidth/ mth for $6.96 US. Whilst I cant disclose Google Adsense figures, I’m sure Christian at this site, as I am, are bringing in a little bit of revenue to support hosting, I make enough from this to pay for hosting each month, with a little left over. I’m not going to retire a millionaire, but at least I can indulge in improved hosting as the site grows, and the occasional hardware upgrade.
At the end of the day though on your comment about expense I can’t see the costs of blogging being super expensive unless you become a Matt Drudge in your success, and then you should be smart enough to leverage your success with revenue.
are we getting paid per click on link or per page impression? because if it per click, my numbers are moving really slowly. i get a gob of page impressions but little click through. i am still not so sure about the ads. and we know that to be a store affiliate of any kind is a joke. so at the moment, i'm running out of ideas
:
Well I actually do make a bit of money from my work on my sites. Up until now I have roughly taken in enough, both through paid advertisements & ecommerce affiliate links, to cover my expenses plus maybe a six pack of beer a month. My expenses are going up though as some months I do consume upwards of 100gb in bandwidth which is getting outside of my current earning ability. This year I need to figure out how to consolidate my resources & strengthen my ability to garner advertisers & click through else my costs are going to clearly outflank my revenue stream and I'll end up paying out of pocket for my site. Which is something I'd really like to avoid.
I'll check out your site the blogherald. I haven't seen it. Liza if you are referring to Google ads, which I don't have as I am one of those arbitrarily locked out of their system due to my content, then the answer is you get paid by the click through.
I hope this helps.
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