I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal about a debate between Jason Calacanis, co-founded Weblogs Inc., a network of blogging sites that was acquired last year by AOL, and Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia Inc. Jason believes blogs with quality content can drive enough traffic to attract advertisers. Mr. Meckler believes that some blogs may achieve a measure of success, but doubts most blogs will be able to generate meaningful profits.
Who is right? It really depends on what your view of success is. Mr. Meckler’s personal blog gets over 300,000 page views per month but he doesn’t have any advertising on it because he think any ad money the blog make would barely be enough to buy a candy bar.
I believe I have said this more than a few times, traffic = money. It’s quite clear to me that Mr. Meckler hasn’t looked at blogging very closely. With a B2B blog like Meckler has, Jason points out the blog can make $4,500 to $15,000 a month with just Google ads. While this may be pocket change for the CEO of Jupitermedia, it’s a nice bit of income for anyone else.
Both Jason and Meckler makes valid points – the main one being that most bloggers will never make any money off their blogs. However, for the few who wants to give it a go, there are and will be many resources available for the bloggers to tap into, like Google, YPN, Adbrite, etc.
You can read the full WSJ article here.
Did you enjoy this post? Get John Chow Dot Com updates via email...
Stay up to date with all of John Chow’s tips for making money online and blog posts by subscribing via email. Your email will be kept private and never shared with anyone.
One of the most common complaint (or excuse) I hear from potential new bloggers is they don’t know how to install WordPress. Terms like FTP and CPanel are like a foreign language and setting up a database might as well be setting up the space shuttle for a launch. Because of the technology barrier, many would-be bloggers never start their blogs...