

Ask YC: Monetizing your blogs? - sharpshoot

Hey all, what do you guys use to monetize your blogs? I'm deciding between options. Is adsense effective? What other considerations do you make when choosing who to go with?
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pchristensen
Seth Godin pointed to a study from the AOL Global Advertising Strategy about
who actually clicks on ads:

'Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim
that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals
their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way
to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer
culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit'

'Who are these "heavy clickers"? They are predominantly female, indexing at a
rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly
Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New
England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web?
Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of
content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love
to talk to telemarketers.'

[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/your-ads-
are...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/your-ads-are-no.html)

[http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/03/who_cli...](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/03/who_clicks_on_a.html)

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bayareaguy
Who needs a script when you can simply install a userContent.css file that
eliminates most ads: <http://www.floppymoose.com/>

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davidw
I'm thinking of de-monetizing mine, as it just doesn't make much money
(adsense), and a cleaner look might be nice. To actually make money, you have
to write a lot about writing on your blog, or have massive amounts of users,
or write about something that a lot of people click on ads about. Meaning that
tech-savvy people, who are the best at ignoring ads, are a terrible audience.

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mattmaroon
I've made a small fortune monetizing my poker blog by creating poker-related
services and leveraging the trust built with my audience. I still collect
significant revenues from this with no ongoing effort beyond answering emails.
In fact, though my traffic was never above 30k uniques a month, I made more
profit than many blogs that have uniques in the low millions, though it was
also more work than simply slapping on ads.

Even off of ad revenue I was making low 4 figures monthly just by selling them
directly. At least in the poker niche, when your blog gets big enough
advertisers seek you out. I don't have enough experience in other niches to
know if the same is true.

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paulgb
I have a feeling that anything gambling-related is easier to make money from.
I had a similar experience with an advertiser (a British casino, iirc.)
seeking me out when I made a silly little blackjack game.

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mattmaroon
I'm pretty sure almost any niche has some sort of profitable business waiting
to be monetized by a blogger with a decently sized, trusting audience.

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PStamatiou
I'd love to know the answer to this one. I've always sucked at monetizing and
I get 300k pviews/month. I've attempted joining the larger tech blog ad
networks but they pretty much won't talk to you until you hit 1M pviews/month.
I'm not one for ugly advertising like adsense - just a personal thing, so I've
started running those 125x125 ad blocks and various sponsorship things.
They're hard to sell but if you can find the right companies and get decent
traffic you can do alright. I sold my last 125x125 for $800 for a month.

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zcoelius
Paul, you should certainly take a look at dropping affiliate links into your
post. At Triggit we have bloggers making really good money with content like
yours. With shopping.com paying a buck a click for gadget traffic it can be
really lucrative. Best of luck.

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marcus
For most blogs, just don't bother. You can make more money from getting your
message out there and from linking to your other work than by advertising
other people's stuff.

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dmoney
Presumably the people reading your blog have similar interests or
circumstances to you. So you could ask yourself what kind of ads or other
stuff you'd want to see if you were the reader.

YCombinator seems to be a good example of monetizing what is more or less a <a
href="http;//paulgraham.com">blog</a>. I guess the generalization would be to
start a business that you and your readers would like to use.

Other than that, I think there's a perception that web ads are sleazy and that
clicking them will lead you to someone who is trying to rip you off. The ad
either needs to be from a known company, look like it was made by real humans
instead of a corporation, or be from sponsors you know the site owner has
dealt with personally be cause s/he sells hir own ads. Come to think of it,
maybe some of your readers have things they want to advertise.

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Kaizyn
Consideration 1: How many readers will go away if monetization feature X is
added? Consideration 2: How much money will feature X make? Consideration 3:
Does feature X fit in well with the rest of the blog?

