How to monetize your blog really well?

Posted by jd
October 12, 2006

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Photo of snapshot of DailyKos home page.

I am impressed with the success of Daily Kos – it is a political blog with probably the highest traffic. It consistently features as among the top ten (most linked to) blogs on Technorati. The website receives many as 20 million visits per week and even more page views. By any measure, this is impressive.

The next issue is monetization – there is still very little data available on “blogging for dollars.” Mind you, to the best of my knowledge, Daily Kos is not what I think as a business, but it does carry advertising. That is why it was interesting to read the interview of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder, in Wired. According to him, they expect to generate $600,000 in revenue during 2006 . He also gave another piece of data about cost of bandwidth ($84,000 per year). Assuming that there are other incidental expenses, the net profit is probably $500,000 – which I am assuming is Zúniga to keep.

So is Daily Kos equally impressive in profitability?

Actually, it is horrible. If we compare Daily Kos to eCreativa Media portfolio, we monetize as much as five times better. Here are a few important lessons for those of you who want to operate a profitable Web 2.0 business:

    Pick your topic carefully. For instance, as the performance of Daily Kos shows, people who come to read political commentary are not necessarily in mood for shopping (the best way to monetize content).
    While all traffic is “good,” not all traffic is profitable.
    PageRank, inbound links, Technorati rank, etc. do not always translate to real profits – and we know that very well from history that eyeballs are not everything.

In conclusion, if you want to run a real business from content, stay away from opinions, and focus on solving real problems through products and services that people can buy.

Business strategy

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