Beyond Advertising, Bloggers Explore New Revenue Models

One could argue that the majority of bloggers do not blog to make money but one could also argue that the majority of those bloggers would like to make money out of the blogging they do. Bloggers put a lot of time into them and a lot of readers get a lot of value from
blogs for basically free.

Darren Rowse just posted an analysis of the revenue models top 30 blogs (that use Sitemeter) and found that all the blogs had a revenue stream (versus half the number a year ago). The most popular sites used a mix of Blog Ads, Amazon links or donation buttons.

The problem for all the other blogs who don’t sit in the top thirty is the lack of traffic to effectively make money from advertising. The number one blog, Daily Kos, is avaeraging 443,481 visits a day whilst the number 30, the Digital Photoghraphy Blog, gets 12,581. At that rate, the DPB makes about $200 a day. About $199 more than the majority of other blogs hope to make a day.

There are some basic costs associated with blogging. The cost of webhosting, email, domain names and other stuff could at least take a blogger over $50 a month - then there’s
the nice dinners to keep your girlfriend ‘understanding what the hell
you’re doing until 2am every morning.’

Obviously, bloggers have tried to use advertising to seek revenue but
unless you’re a Gawker or a Scoble you can’t get the traffic. So what are the options?

Some bloggers
are becoming brands in themselves and this has enabled them to offer alternatives to advertising. Josh Rubin, the Cool
Hunter, launched a Holidays gift site last year which
people had to pay $7.95 for access. He told me very soon after it launched that it broke even
easily.

Hugh MacLeod has been offering business cards on his Gaping Void site since time began, but now he has just launched a T Shirt range featuring his
anarchic designs for 20 quid a throw. And the Wooster Collective started selling grown-up-children’s coloring books last year and more recently they started offering mobile downloads of contemporary artists work that cost a couple of bucks each.

And PSFK? Sometimes we argue why we have so many ads. It makes everythign look so messy. Instead, we’ve been asked a couple of times to use our skills and
information gathered through blogging to create custom reports. Now, we’re offering this as a professional service.

As bloggers dedicate more and more time to their crack-like hobby, we’re going to see more and more innovative revenue generating ideas from them. What other examples are there? We’ll keep an eye on this - and update the comments section.