o’neill media

Sorry, but you can’t. Most blogs start out with Google Adsense to subsidize their writing habits. Unfortunately, unless you write about luxury jets or mortgages you will probably be seeing about $0.20 per click for your efforts, and that’s only if someone clicks on one of those ads. I know, I know there is a segment of the population that will just click everywhere on your site, and knows nothing about what the ads are for, but I’m sorry, people are becoming increasingly web savvy and these ads just don’t speak to them. I’ll give credit to Weblogs Inc. for creating a company that pretty much existed on Google Adsense, BUT that’s with arguably the biggest blog (Engadget) in the world on their side. Even then, with god knows how many page views the entire network had per month, they only made $2MM, this is really surprising to me, and a testament to how little money there is in the blog world.

Google Adsense comes in handy for filler, but overall this is never going to pay the bills. People have moved over to AdBrite which at least gives you the luxury of seeing what the advertiser is paying, but this is a stopgap solution as well. The next step, banner ads, but I’m sorry if you ever want to build a formidable web business, banner ads won’t cut it either, but that is a topic for another discuss. The barriers to entry in blogging are too low, and the content is becoming increasingly competitive for eyeballs to be worthwhile at all for an advertiser to pay a premium for your content. It’s unfortunate, but if you are a blogger you do it for personal reasons, or for love of the medium, that’s it. It’s a great forum for what it is, but it is not a business.

This is not to say that it is not possible to make money off of your blog. Check back tomorrow to see how, but direct online profits alone will give you little to nothing. So I’m going to go to the movies by myself with my Adsense earnings from this month.