Blog Monetization update: Mar 2007

I'm quite happy blogging away with a readership of around 20-50 people a day - as long as someone is reading I feel that I'm not wasting my time. But low readership does make "blog monetization" difficult. Some PF blogs apparently have hundreds or thousands of regular readers, although for some of these blogs I can't work out what the attraction is. If your blog gets lots of readers than the "click through" ads such as Google's adsense are probably the "gold standard", but with my traffic levels I was only making a few cents each month. For that reason my google adsense is now "wrapped" within an AdBrite script that somehow displays their ads (in the same formatting as my google ad block) if they can beat a target rate which I've set. Again, with a low readership and hardly any click throughs or sales, my AdBrite income appears to be around to 25c/month level. One draw-back with AdBrite is that they pay by cheque (in USD) which will take a chunk out of my payment (assuming I ever hit the $100 threshold I set).

I have also made a small amount of commission from Amazon.com affiliate links to advertise some books I've bought for my own library and found useful. The commision rate is OK, but with hardly any sales via these links I'm not sure I'll ever get paid. I think the payment is also via a credit to buy something from Amazon.com, so it's not real money as far as I can tell.

The most lucrative monetization efforts have been the "sponsored posts" I've done - for PayPerPost and ReviewMe. ReviewMe only offers topics infrequently, and as I only post on topics/products that I feel are interesting and I can honestly review, I haven't made much money from them. They pay straight to my PayPal account, which is good. The most "serious" money I've made from this blog has come from PayPerPost. I've so far done 33 posts, of which 31 have paid out already - a total of USD$209.39. The other two posts should pay out USD$15.00 in the next couple of weeks.

So far my total "monetization" has put around AUD$400 into my paypal account. The current balance is AUD$34.43 and I've transferred AUD$319 from my Paypal account into one of my online savings accounts in the past 6 months.

All in all the amount raised is trivial compared to the time spent blogging, but it's achieving it's target of raising enough income to offset the cost of my broadband connection, and miscellaneous costs such as my "friend" membership of pfblogs.



Enough Wealth