Thursday, April 1, 2010

Profiles of Successful Money Making Blogs

Blogs can be highly profitable as a recent Business Week report on full time bloggers reveal. The ability to make money from the simple act of blogging or writing is an attractive concept to many, particularly when one realizes the amount of income blogs can really generate.

Business Week’s article offers several mini-case studies with income and traffic reports for several websites and I found it a rather interesting read.

Some of the blogs included in Business Week’s list include popular blogs like Boing Boing, Shoemoney, Problogger and Perez Hilton.

1. I Can Has Cheezburger?

“If you hit a niche and you can build a community, you might not have a $1 million idea, but you might have a $10,000 or a $100,000 idea,” says Nakagawa, who gave up his job as a software developer to play Cheezburger full-time.”

* Launched: January 2007
* Niche: Humor
* Revenue: Estimated $5,600/mth
* Traffic: 15 million pageviews/mth
* Alexa Rank: 4,996


2. Boing Boing

Advertising costs range from $350 to display a small button ad for one week to between $2,000 and $3,000 for the minimum 170,000 impressions on banner ads, all sold exclusively through Federated Media. Frequent posting—the four authors update the site 20 to 40 times each day—drives high traffic to the blog.

* Launched: January, 2000
* Niche: Humor/Cyberculture
* Revenue: Over $1 million a year
* Traffic: 22 million pageviews/mth
* Alexa Rank: 2,180

3. Mashable

Cashmore says it’s the most-trafficked blog on the subject. But he didn’t expect to make a living from it when he began. “The idea that top bloggers would be making large sums was laughable,” Cashmore says. “The folks who held on, however, are doing pretty well these days.”

* Launched: July, 2005
* Niche: Technology/Web 2.0
* Revenue: Estimated $166,000/mth
* Traffic: 4 million pageviews/mth
* Alexa Rank: 1,493

4. Go Fug Yourself

The mechanics are simple: They take celebrity photos from a wire service, add snarky comments about the getups, and click “publish.” The result? Some 3.5 million unique visitors a month, a book coming out in February, and two full-time jobs.

* Launched: July, 2004
* Niche: Celebrity
* Revenue: Estimated $6,240
* Traffic: 4 million pageviews/mth
* Alexa Rank: 14,237

5. Perez Hilton

He may also be the hardest-working blogger making fun of show business, with 24 posts on an average day—and as many as 40 on a day with talk of a Britney Spears meltdown. “Advertisers come to me because I get a lot of traffic. I get a lot of traffic because I work hard.”

* Launched: September, 2004
* Niche: Celebrity
* Revenue: Estimated $111,000/mth
* Traffic: 4 million pageviews/mth
* Alexa Rank: 929

6. Overheard in New York

Although Overheard brings in cash, he says, “I’ve always approached it more as a community than a business. I want to make enough so we can invest more to grow. I’m not trying to build a Web 2.0 company that I can sell for millions of dollars.”

* Launched: July, 2003
* Niche: Humor/Urban Culture
* Revenue: Estimated $8,100/mth
* Traffic: 6 million pageviews/mth
* Alexa Rank: 30,122

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