Blogging for $$$

Comic strip blogger talks about Darren Rowse, Cam Reilly has breakfast with him and talks about how much money he makes with his blog ($14,500 in Google ads in one month???). If he’s such a power, how come I never heard of this guy until yesterday?

Google Ads mailed me yesterday. They have finally noticed that I have taken them off my page. I just never ported them into my new templates on WordPress and haven’t been on fire to do so. Mainly, it’s because the ads they served were so bad and boring. Nine times out of ten, it was something about an RSS reader. Yawn. I actually got some checks from them and made a reasonable amount of money, but not so much that I feel like farting around with them. I really hate the whole “don’t talk about what you make” stuff, which I think is the opposite of “don’t be evil.” What we do here is about candor and Google’s method of squashing candor also really bugs me. If I made more or they were less of a pain in the ass, maybe I’d put them back on. For now, I just don’t feel like it.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

12 thoughts on “Blogging for $$$”

  1. Which is no wondern, because it is contextual advertisement, and the keyword density on this page is pure RSS / Blog stuff. 🙂

    But if you would be slightly interested in that, you would have heard of him by a long time ago ;))))

  2. Such power the hands of one man… He doesn’t need your stinking filthy money Google so take that! Muh haha!

  3. If he counted an average of 2 million visitors a month, he could make that kind of money. Leo Laporte once publicly said that he makes about a grand a month on his sites – it’s a little hard to believe that Mr. Rose is 14 times more popular than Mr. Laporte but anything is possible, I guess.

  4. Damn, and I was doing this for the fun of it! Even a grand a month would help a lot! With the Rand/Dollar exchange at 8.6 at the moment.

    Well, those are just dreams, I do this for the fun of it!

  5. thanks for the link.

    You’re right though that I’m nowhere near as popular as Leo Laporte – but making money isn’t completely linked to popularity.

    Part of it is more to do with the topic you choose, the design and positioning of your ads etc.

  6. Dave, Darren’s pretty well known in problogger circles. But I guess as you can tell from the interview, he’s a quiet, nice guy who isn’t a voracious “self-promoter” like some. He let’s his sites do the talking. And, as he says in the show, he knows of other guys who make MORE money than he does from AdSense but who keep a very low profile so no-one has heard of them. Apparently they don’t want to draw attention to their sites to avoid “me too” sites which dilute their earning capacity.

  7. Dang, who’d have thunk this simple post would light up the comments?

    Clint, I missed that. Thanks for pointing that out to me. If we can talk about it, then I was earning about $10 a month, 4 orders of magnitude from Mr. Rowse. Damn. What really turned me against them was that after the podcast era kicked in, my traffic went up 10X and my Google ads revenue went up about 20%. It was such a radical underperformance that I stopped giving much of a shit about them.

    Nicole, “RSS” appears five times on this page – one of them is this post and two are the boilerplate links to feeds. I used to get downright happy when I’d get some off the wall ad just because it was interesting.

    Darren, no prob.

    Cam, I haven’t heard it yet. I only update once a day and I missed it. I’ll hear it tomorrow. I don’t even know what problogging circles are. How is this different from blogging? Are these the people whose primary motivation for blogging is to earn money? As I say, I haven’t heard yet and I’m not pre-judging but this seems on the hairy edge of unsavory. To paraphrase Spinal Tap – “There’s a fine line between clever and cynical.”

  8. ‘Problogging circles’ is a kinda weird idea. Does this mean to be a successful blogger you have to be a SEO freak writing content chockers with keywords? That sounds like advertising by another name to me

  9. “SEO freak writing content chockers”??? What kind of language is that Trev??? Are you delerious again?? Speak the King’s english dammit!

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