Technorati, the blog search engine, put out Part I of its sporadic (now-annual?) State of the Blogosphere report this week. This year, it conducted a random survey of 1,079 random bloggers (a statistically significant sample) to paint a more detailed picture of just who exactly is out there blogging. Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.
And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:
Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.
The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.
Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. The vast majority of all bloggers (79 percent) write about their personal interests. No surprise there.
But more than half of all bloggers also write about business. While only 12 percent identify themselves as official “corporate bloggers,” a full 46 percent consider themselves “professional bloggers” (meaning that they write about their industries, but not in an official capacity).
Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men, 42 percent went to graduate school, and 50 percent earn more than $75,000 a year, and 58 percent are over 35 years old. (Someone call the diversity police).
More than half have a separate full time job. More than half of survey respondents have been blogging for more than two years.Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. San Francisco and the Bay Area has the most bloggers in the U.S., with New York City, Chicago, and LA also having a strong showing. Although, as the map below shows, the geographic distribution is actually pretty wide.
And blogs continue to be read: blogs in the aggregate now attract 77.7 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to Comscore, nearly double the number of people who visit Facebook.
This is just the first day of the report, so get ready for a lot of data over the next four days. A complete index of the State of the Blogosphere going back to 2004 is here.
May be Mr. MA should write a book on how to create a successful blog. I’ll be the first to buy.
So will I, as long as it doesn’t cost too much!
I want to be the first too!
Wait so Australia is its on continent now?
http://en.wikip...%28continent%29
New Site For College Students: http://www.inkampus.com
$6K/yr is a good sum of money for writing blog entries
Not necessarily. If you’re spending 10 hrs a week writing, then $6k/year is chump-change – unless the enjoyment you receive makes up the difference.
I’ve gotten up to that amount via a mixture of revenue streams. But my consulting on social media has sky rocketed that I make 10X that amount now consulting PR firms on social media then by running ads on the site. It’s all about leveraging your resources to take you to new heights.
Yeah, I’m not interested in making $6k / yr. I’d settle with $5k / mo., as long as it’s on the side. If I were to make a go of it and try to get blogging full time, I’d definitely be aiming for that upper echelon of $15-20k / mo. from blogging alone.
It’s all about dedication. I currently make next to nothing, but I focus no effort on blogging, and all effort on my day job. This article is inspiring though…makes me wanna start putting a little more time into blogging on the side.
$6,000 would be nice, but averages are always skewed by the outlyers. Not even myself, Lord Mac, is making over $6K.
Well, according to Compete your blog gets no traffic and doesn’t exist, which may explain why it’s not making money.
…and you have to running ads.
I’m just hoping to make $6.
The Golden Rule for a successful blog? Content. The rest is smoke-filled coffehouse non-sense.
Ads are taking over the world…before too long you’ll have ads in your dreams
I think they took over quite some time ago. Ever heard of TV? Perhaps they become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten about them.
Right! So, for how much time ads can be the main earning source ?
Great idea! I’ll put my hands on it
I’m actually wondering what your Alexa traffic rank has to be in order to get 100,000 uniques daily to make that amount per year…:-)
100k uniques DAILY?
You’d have to have a pretty damn high rank..!
Excellent post. Interesting details regarding the blogoshpere.
To Shawn Drewry – 100k / month.
58% of bloggers are 35 years and older. thats something to think about.
So, once you have content on your blog, how do you generate 100K uniques a month?
Check out my blog and while you are there click on an ad so maybe I can get four figures of income today (including what’s right of the decimal point).
Be interesting and/or useful.
don’t let the sleuths at AdSense catch you saying that or they’ll bust your ass, brother.
I don’t know when I will ever be able to take anything Technorati says seriously…next!
The problem is that the $6000 is the median.
The mean (or, average) is more telling, which is closer to $200 if you have ads. Zero if you don’t.
– tekpopuli: totally truthful tech news.
uhm… no.
the $6000 is the mean (arithmetic average), the median is $200.
$200 is still the more telling figure, but it is the median.
http://mathforu...view/58326.html
WOW. Is Africa really < 0%. thats very sad.
“Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men” – really… you’re going to say that blog writing is a mostly male activity based on that slim difference… take into account some range of statistical error and this seems like an inane comment.
Those rev numbers are complete nonsense. Even if blogs made up 5% of total online ad spending there would have to be at least 100,000 blogs making over 10k to see that kind of mean. I hope they actually post numbers. It’d also be interesting to see how many blogs fit into that 100k uniques category.
$75k/year seems a lot for 100,000 uniques a month
Lord Mac, you should put more ads on your site, you would make the $6,000 easy.
75$k a year with 100,000 visitors per month? I find that hard to believe as well, but if you suppose that the majority of those 100,000 visitors are either targeted traffic from search engines or regular readers then I can believe it.
However, that’s probably supposing you have a good system in place, with some ads, affiliate links and such
$75K is the average for sites with 100K uniques *or more*, so it is an average
that includes sites with millions of uniques. So sites with about 100K uniques would be much less, je suppose.
i could have sworn title was bloggers average 6k
i must be seeing things
I am getting 100,000+ unique visitors and my blog is only 3 weeks old. There is a principle called “content is king”. If you have great content, people will come read your blog(and even subscribe to your feed).
But I have so far made $70 in 3 weeks using Adsense only. There is one 300×250 and two 125×125 ad slots for advertisers at a cheap price tag. But so far nobody has contacted me. And yeah if they do, then I can make total of $500/ month, which will lead me to $6000/year.
So I can agree with this Technorati Report.
Btw Erick I think you should read the report again, it says “$75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.” …. Read clearly here, it says 100,000 or more, which means it can also be 200,000 or maybe 500,000 unique visitors, so it varies.
Cheers, Nakodari
http://www.addictivetips.com/
How much is techcrunch is making ?
“Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. ”
A stunning turnaround. Just nine months ago, Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden wrote:
“Although English speakers outnumber Japanese speakers by more than 5-1, slightly more blog postings are written in Japanese than in English, according to Technorati, the Internet search engine that monitors the blogosphere.
Hmm… http://www.tvlampsnbulbs.com is no where on the Technorati radar. I think there are different rules for a site like this or Gizmodo, and sites that play into a niche.
Our site is 5 months old and I’d say that $6,000 sounds about accurate after adding all the different partners used on the site to generate revenue. The cool part is that once you get to 1,000 uniques per day you can actually make money selling display ads. We only get 200 per day, so it makes no sense to try to get a $1 CPM when Adsense pays $.85 CPC.
A guy can only hope to get a bigger following but like all of the other comments, you have to give people something they can’t get elsewhere: more updated content, more concise analysis, or just a better overall conversation (comments included).
I read somewhere some time ago that Techcrunch makes $200,000-$300,000/month..mostly thru direct ad sales. But they have over 1 million uniques/month (not to mention over 1 million RSS subscribers).
Technorati is down and has been for the last 10 minutes
“http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/” – this link is dead…or is it Techcrunch effect?
@Nakodari
You are making only $70/3 weeks with 100,000 uniques?? I’m making that with far less uniques….so probably your audience isn’t very targeted….do you buy Stumbleupon traffic or something like that?
Yeah visitors from social websites makes most of my traffic. If visitors start coming from search engines, then they are more targeted.
Then optimize more you site for search engines
…
Yeah i am doing that. It is only 3 weeks old now.
wow this means I only have 70,000 more members to get!
Does anyone know how I can get 70,000 more users? It took me a year to hit 5000 OMG!!!
Depends on your blog target.
If you are tech try to get listed in Reddit, Digg, Killerstartups, Highscalability (write articles for them pointing to your website – if you have valuable articles there which is also Highscalability’s target…once on Highscalability then you’ll be bookmarked on various sites, you could also get into Reddit if somebody thinks your article deserve it).
And try to write articles for other more important blogs (establish a relationship with them) and on target forums.
Problem is that dude is running a digg/reddit/etc. clone site. Nice of you to offer suggestions
Yeah good advice for a blog! But in general I am running a digg clone script but specifically designed for bloggers and only bloggers!
This is frankly is a crock of sh*t, at least as far as my experience goes. Here’s my experience:
My blog: http://www.yesbutnobutyes.com
My uniques: 250k a month (according to Google Analytics)
My annual revenue from five or six ad systems combined: about 15k a year.
Now matter how hard I try, that’s it. 1-2k a month revenue TOPS. Before expenses.
And I’m not an idiot when it comes to revenue generation. At least I don’t think so. But hey – if anyone shows me a way I can get even close to $75k in a year that doesn’t drive away my visitors, I’ll willingly cut them in for 10% of that amount in the first year.
a) Your with break.
b) You only have two slots
c) You aren’t using any remant ads
d) You are not a high paying demographic
Some of that is true, some of that isn’t, but I’m not sure that necessarily makes us way outside the average. *Shrug*
Steve,
You have a really good blog, I check it out every now and then. Do you run affiliate programs? If so I’d be interested in throwing some business your way.
It’s all about niche I think. The article specifically says that an overwhelming percentage of the blogs are “business” blogs. I think if you run a site that focuses on things like making money or improving your business, you’re more likely to have an audience that is willing to slap down their credit card to purchase stuff you recommend.
Your blog looked more to me like it was sort of personal mixed with interesting stories you come across. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I would wager it’s much harder for you to get people to pay for stuff you recommend in the same numbers that someone in the “make money online” marketplace probably does….
I think these numbers are very dependent on what niche you’re in up to a point. Once you reach a certain number of uniques per month (much higher than 100K) and you represent a huge marketing audience, then it’s much easier to get direct ad placements which is a substantial part of the 75K for most of the people who earn it…
If you want to see where you stand or what you can sort of expect for direct ad purchases, my favorite site to browse is http://www.BuySellAds.com. They list hundreds of blogs and the type of traffic they get, accompanied with what it costs to advertise there. You can find a site with similar traffic to yours, and see what they are charging and whether or not they are selling through their ad space inventory.
The problem is that most people who have good blogs don’t want to be an expert in selling ads. Problogger and similar sites require you to learn all about monetisation techniques in order to bring in a little cash…boring.
I’ve found revenuesolved.com a really handy service. It suggests monetisation techniques based on your site’s unique profile. No catches either, from what I can see – you apply to the ones you want.
Bloggers can make even more than they currently do.
AD Village gives 80-100% of revenue back to bloggers and also provides advertisers with rich crowdsourced data mining tools and deep ROI analysis. We just launched at the BlogWorld Expo this past weekend. Come beta test so we can make this product ROCK!
“It’s f**king brilliant!”
http://ad-village.com
What’s so hard to believe Erick? TechCrunch not monetizing as well as Toys-for-Troops.com? lol
Someone correct this back of the envelope math:
$75,000 / 12 months = $6,250 per month
$6,250 / 100 = $62.50 cpm, right?
So, since the site is getting 100k uniques, what if it’s 200k page views?
$31.25 cpm, right?
But more sticky sites get more page views and not so good performance on ads. Even at 400k page views: $15.625 cpm, right?
Sure, these cpms are for the whole website, but to say these numbers are averages seems a little bit of a stretch. Maybe my math is off, but I still think that number is quite high.
blogs are a dime-a-dozen.. honestly, anyone can write. Admittedly, few write well, but soooo many just have to try..
I’m trying to build a memetic ecosystem.. it’ll be p2p someday, beyond all the sites.. but coding takes time, too much time.. zzzZzzZzz
100 k unique visitors translates to at least around 800k page views a month (these $75000 bloggers typically are the ones who write at least 3 – 4 posts proabably every day, so even 800k page views is on the very low side assuming 2 posts a week!) Also, assuming half are from readers who directly access the website, (rest come as part of their feeds) that means 800k typically becomes 800 * 1.5 PVs = 1.2 MM PVs a month given the new found strategy of only having a part of the story in the main page, and having the detailed story one page inside (so one extra PV). That becomes 6250 / 1200 = more like $5 CPM. Given these are folks with lot more posts per day, increase the original 2 posts per week to more like 5 posts per week, automatically we can get the CPM rate approx more like $2. Given the no. of ad slots ppl play around with (not just 1 big, maybe 6 – 8 small + a few CPC based stuff), thats not improbably money!
Shortly after his keynote, Richard and I discussed debuting this data annually at BlogWorld.
We generate revenue of over 150k a year with about 150,000 user sessions a month (not uniques – but sessions). If you are in the right niche, there are a heck of a lot of ways (ad networks, affiliate sales, direct ad sales, merchandise sales, etc.) to make money with a website or blog nowadays.
I would add some thoughts generated by other commenters – most blogs, and even websites don’t average much more that 1 to 2 pages per session. If they do, the CPMs go way down. If you want to make money from a website, you don’t want people sticking around anyway – you get paid when they leave (unless you are a retail site – but most bloggers aren’t).
4,000 visits a day probably gets you an Alexa Rank or around 200k – you can extrapolate from there. That being said – Alexa can be way, way off – I know – I have several sites and can compare them against Google Analytics, Alexa, Quantcast and others. Sometimes Alexa is just out to lunch on certain sites.
I have some blogs that I have worked a lot on and never make more than $50 a month, mostly from AdSense and Amazon. Some we only update once every 2 months, and they make several hundred a month – go figure. We also do several small blogs – micro sites – that have a specific keyword URL, etc. After set up, with almost no maintenance (one hasn’t seen a post this year) they routinely have days where they will make a buck or 2 or 3 or more – plus Amazon sales, etc.
You never know what is going to work – but I wish I would have thought up purseblog.com – look at the Alexa rank on that. They must be in that 75k and above category with that traffic – which reminds me – I think a lot of people here need to remember that there are other topics out there beside technology
I’d venture a guess that the reason many folks find these numbers somewhat unbelievable is that 1,079 “random” bloggers isn’t necessarily statistically significant.
The number of participants is not what makes a survey sample accurate. More important is the true random distribution of the sample itself. This sample set is probably NOT all that random. It’s highly likely that those who responded are those who are most successful. That skews all results up, and the sample probably does not accurately represent the lower echelon of the 7.499 million other bloggers.
Dear bloggers,
What tools have you used for monetization? What worked best?
If you’re not techcrunch or gizmodo, the chances of getting serious sponsor $$$ are slim. Can anyone enlighten the rest of us?
This numbers are still much better than no numbers and for the newbie in blogging world it is quite interesting to see some numbers from behind the scene:) It also motivates me to become much more serious considering regular blogging, finding the right niche market and especially to offer unique quality content.
actually i really new in blogging… really nice to visit this blog…its amazing
This is total bullshit.
I have 250k uniques a month and make about $100/mo, it all depends on your audience. If you want to make any money blogging, you have to target dumb people who are not savvy enough to know better when they’re clicking ads, this is like most websites really.
OnlineAdvertiser – what is your site about? 250k uniques – I would guess at least 300 to 400k page views? I think I could help you monetize this traffic in some way – unless it is a photo site or something. You should send me an email -
OnlineAdvertiser: What source do you pull your traffic data from? Most of the time hosting companies are way off from actual real visitors. For instance I see 13,000 Unique Visitors today from my hosting company, yet SiteMeter reports just over 4k.
The big thing with CPM is the content of your site, right now tech related ads are paying out very well, but ads from our sports related blog pay out only a fraction.
I’m yet to look at the report but I’m curious to see stats for blog networks. For the entire network and for the individual participants.
Are we about to see more blog networks forming up in the future as a way to increase revenue from blogging per capita?
Wait a minute: they’re classifying Yahoo’s OMG and AOL’s TMZ as blogs?!?
If ad revenues from either of those two sites contributed to revenue averages, their whole premise is garbage.
If you blog about tech, with 100k uniques, there is absolutely no way you’re making 75,000. Thats niche bloggers only. I pull in 10-50k uniques a month, and come no where near anything like that on my personal tech focused blog. Though if you’re blogging about a good niche, you can certainly make a lot more. Some of my other sites while not getting that many readers, do make an amount of money thats proportional to what we’re talking here.
Why not use some logic here people.
Since when does “the mean revenue for blogs getting 100k OR MORE visitors/month is $75k” equate to “100k visitors/month = $75k”
This is the AVERAGE of the entire pool of blogs with over 100k visitors. That means that a site like techcrunch, getting millions of visitors and pulling in millions per year is USED TO CALCULATE the average.
If someone told you that the “average salary of people making over $100k/year is $400k/year”….would you really think that the only thing you need to do to make $400k/year is make $100k/year?
Goodness
@Andy Swan – Thanks!
Sorry the summary was not more clear (”Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.”)
Here’s some additional context: among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. Some of the bloggers in this group told us that they have more than one million unique visitors each month. Note that the median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000. These numbers represent self-reported income. We’ll have much more detailed data on revenue in the Day 4 segment: Blogging for Profit.
Hi,
Well, I’m almost there. Already got 9 subscribers
These numbers should be taken with a lot of grains of salt. I have a website (created before there was such a thing as blogs) that routinely gets over 100,000 uniques a month. I’ve never earned more than $17,000 from it in a year, and most of that is from Amazon commissions. My site is nice and it’s popular so you’d think I’d generate some decent ad earnings, but the ad money just isn’t out there for websites as far as I can see.
i guess its all about the subject of your blog and the profile of your readers weather u can make money out of eat or not.
that nice jose u already have 9 subscribers, my blog not have any subscriber yet because not have any interesting entry yet…
what is make me really respect for this site is the no of subcribers is more than 1000K…
There is more impressive Mazuki,
check – shoemoney.com
– johnchow.com