I am a big money blogger, relatively speaking

July 3, 2009
By Billy Dennis

I got a huge chuckle out of this tidbit from Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader;

In my column in this week’s print edition, I mistakenly said the Tribune was paying Chicago Now bloggers $5 per 10,000 hits. I called that the equivalent of carfare.

I stand corrected: the Tribune’s paying $5 per 1,000 local hits, the equivalent of — well, carfare. Bill Adee, the paper’s innovation chief, tells me Chicago Now has some 65 bloggers and last month recorded 700,000 pageviews. That works out to $3,500 split 65 ways, or about $54 a blogger for the month.

I sat down and added up all my add revenue during the course of a year, divided by 12 and concluded that I earned roughly $150 a month. Of course, Site Meter tells me my pageviews are roughly 50,000 a month.

It’s carfare. But it’s also Web hosting fare. And ISP fare. If I quit my job and start selling ads like crazy and manage to consistently get 15-20 times the ad revenue I currently get, I can make a living from full-time blogging. At least I have a head start over those saps at Chicago Now.

Woo Hoo!

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3 Responses to “ I am a big money blogger, relatively speaking ”

  1. Darren Daz cox on July 3, 2009 at 7:47 am

    yeah, and yet the more sponsors you have the less freedom you have to really say the truth as you would feel obligated to ‘protect’ your sponsors. There’s a threshold, in my opinion, where freedom of speech/press meets the corporate bottom line, newspapers and tv have long ago crossed the line to where advertising directs the content.
    I’d hate to see that happen on a blog, because once a blog becomes encrusted with advertising it is most likely unable to to be totally honest because, as you said PP, if you can make a living off it you “win” (because the more money the less of a ’sap’ you are I gather).

  2. Billy Dennis on July 3, 2009 at 8:15 am

    Thanks for the comment. It is certainly provocative.

    You argue that the more sponsors I have the less freedom I will have. The contrary is true. The more advertisers, the less beholden I am (theoretically speaking) I am to any one of them.

    Of course, a whore is a whore, no matter how many johns she (or he) sees on any one given day.

  3. Darren Daz cox on July 4, 2009 at 10:04 am

    It’s not whoring to sell advertising and you are not obligated to shill but deep down, once you have grown accustomed to the money you will be wary of rocking the boat, not your brave conscious mind that would never sacrifice journalistic integrity for crass filthy lucre, but the subconscious.

    The subconscious doesn’t care about what other people think, it just cares about what you need. It will be directing your decisions the way it does for all your other needs, that’s why junkies will drift to prostitution rather than cleaning up because the drugs provide a need and the subconscious modifies the conscious so that the needs of the flesh are met.

    Money, especially money from your own hard work, provides creature comfort and ego gratification, it would hurt to lose that money so the subconscious would subtly influence any decisions that your conscious mind will make. Probably won’t mean anything much in the long run but it’s possible!