Blogging: Time versus Money

Chris Anderson in The Long Tail writes a good analysis on the amount of time we’re all putting in to Blog, and not paying attention to the ad dollars : DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB.
He quotes : An interesting tidbit from Guy Kawasaki’s wrap-up of his first full year blogging. Note that his blog has been consistently between the 35th and 45th most popular in the world, according to Technorati, and made only $3,350. Traffic: 2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day, or about 180,000 page views/month.

To compare with the bigger bloggers, I believe, Om Malik’s doing over 6 Million page views / year, and about $500k / year in revenues.

If you have any question about why Guy should care, understand that $500k is material for him. Since his Garage.com is a relatively smallish fund, he doesn’t make the $1-$3 Million / year salary (a dear friend recently called these grand VC salaries Venture Welfare). And book royalties are okay sources of revenues, but unless you have a Da Vinci Code or a Harry Potter in your hands, most of the money is still going to publishers.

If I am not wrong, Guy could actually convert his Blog to if not his primary revenue source, but certainly a serious secondary revenue source. His switching out of Google to FM could well get him there. What do say, Guy?

My experience with Blogs, I have to say, has led me to a point where I need to definitely cut back the time that I invest in it, and find some efficient way of getting traffic, as well as monetizing. Hence, one of my new year resolutions is to find a channel that provides me with both. I am having a lot of discussions along these lines right now, which have been educational for sure. I will write in due course, how I see some blogging networks developing, as a result of what I am learning.

Needless to say, it is neither my primary source, nor my secondary source of revenue, but for sure, if I am to continue to invest energy into the activity, it needs to become, at least, a tertiary source!