Advertisements: Useful or Distraction
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With the costs of being a blogger ever increasing as the years go on, (through the costs of updating a website, buying a domain and buying hosting), there comes a time when it is nice to see a "return" on your investment. However, with programs like adsense and MOG, many bloggers have been able to make some of their money back on their investment, but the question still remains: Are advertisements really worth it? Do they detract from the content? Are they appealing enough? And are the menial payouts worth the cost to appeal of your website?What do you guys think?
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The costs of being a blogger has actually fallen a fair bit over the years - or at least that's my experience.I would say the decision over ads is a personal one, with the amount of traffic you're getting being one factor to look at. If you're getting under 20,000 pageviews per month, then I would say ads probably aren't worth the effort and the distraction to your content. If you're getting more than that then you can get beer money from them, and if you're getting over 80,000 pageviews per month then the price of your hosting will rise sharply as that is about the limit of shared hosting environments - and ads are definitely useful to cover this higher outlay.Ads are definitely a distraction though, so you have to weigh up the costs and benefits yourself.
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I think under 1000~2000 unique (maybe it's about 10~20K view) ads, as income source is not worth the hassle. At this level a blog is not large enough to generate click traffic. Do fund drive instead. It definitely can pay annual expense of ISP and domain name. a 1~2K blog should have regular followers and fan. (Look around your nearest blogging peer and see who has ads, who done what for income) This should be about first 2 yrs. I think one could do 2 annual fund drives and maybe one tiny one. Conservatively about $4~500 total, if a blog is just average, but loveable. Basically money wise, ISP/Domain/maybe get yourself a big dinner. You really into this for fun.
around 3K unique, ad start to play role if you are into it. You can develop more defined audience, regular content that adverts likes, and generate enough clicks. If you live in major metropolitan area, you can have local presence. meet up, go to concert, etc. But I seriously doubt you can get more than few change for coffee and lunch on top of server . At this level it is much more important to develop relationship with audience, bands, records folks, local etc. This is the bigger reward at this level. You can talk to people and have access to smaller events. (congratulation. You ARE that hipster dude.)
5 to 10K. I don't know much, i don't have the drive to reach this level. this is just from observing. More meaningful income from small writing gig, freelancing, DJ, doing PR, or internet companies, etc. At this level, you know more about scenes and music than average bloggers care to do. You are the big guy. Most people on the net are doing radio, writing for magazine, doing band promo, or some internet outfit.
Most important I think is still looking around, nearest blog peers, local ground, happening online/social networking, talk to people .. steady income purely from adverts is not possible for small-medium blog.
also, around 3K, you should know what your blog appeal is in term of design. You have done your homework and experiment what is/is not acceptable to your audience in term of design. If advert fit or not in overall blog scheme.
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I agree with Tim and Squashed. While you're still small, it's not worth the effort. But, once you're approaching 100k pageviews a month, it can begin to be worthwhile. At these levels, you can probably make $100 - $200 per ad per month, assuming you land yourself on a network with a good fill.As you start to grow larger (>250k), you can wiggle your way onto better ad networks, where the payouts and fill rates are significantly higher.Above 1 million pageviews, you'll be able to comfortable turn blogging into a full-time profession, with somewhere between $4k - 8k monthly.But the caveat is that, as with most things, the bigger you get, the more expensive things are to run. Right now I think I'm spending ~$3k per month to keep Indie Shuffle running smoothly.
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Yep, I'd say there are very few above 1 million. Excluding hip-hop, I can think of roughly 10 music blogs > 1 million.
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Tim, what kinda CPM and fill rate you getting from them?
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I agree that with around 20,000 hits a month probably won't generate much revenue, but is there other methods that you guys have tried that to get the attention of advertisers. Or, on the other-hand, are there any advertising services that you would highly suggest. I see that you said SAY Media Tim, do you generate reasonably good revenue from them. Also, was getting accepted reasonably easy, or did you have to have high click-thru rates etc... etc... Additionally, to Jason, I saw that you had Puma and other ads like emusic up recently. Did you contact them, or did they contact you?
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Most of our ads are running through SPIN....but occasionally we do direct sales w/ some folks. Until you're doing 500k+ pageviews monthly, deals like that probably won't manifest :-(
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