Earlier in the month I asked readers to share their blog earnings for the month of October. As usual this poll was a popular one with 3054 responses. I’ve run this survey previously so will compare the results between this and last time I ran it below.
Of this number 857 said that they did not earn any money blogging (28%). This is either because they don’t try to – or they try but fail (next time I’ll ask for clarification around this).
Of those that do earn some money blogging the breakdown of earnings into different earning ranges was as follows:
For those of you interested in the percentages – here’s a pie chart.
Keep in mind that these figures are just for those who earn something from blogging (and don’t include the 28% who don’t).
49% earned under $100
23% earned over $1000
16% earned over $2500
9% earned over $15000
Comparison to last time
So how do these recent results compare with previous times that we’ve carried out this same survey of readers?
In mid 2006 I asked exactly the same question with the same earning ranges and I think you’ll see below that the percentages are remarkably similar:
One last note. When I’ve asked readers to respond to how much they earn from different ad networks (AdSense and Chitika) the shape of the graphs has always been the same. While the percentages vary slightly the results are always quite similar.
So – what can we conclude?
For me the most striking ‘lesson’ from these surveys is that while there is significant hype around the idea of bloggers making money – that the vast majority earn very little (or nothing). A quarter of those who earn something make less than 0.33 cents per day. If that’s not a reality check then I don’t know what is.
On the flip side – a smaller group of bloggers are making good to great amounts of money. While I’m sure there are some votes that are put in the highest category falsely – I do believe that there are an increasing number of bloggers who making significant part time income through to full time income from their blogs. That top category is significant and seem to be growing.
It would’ve been nice to see how many bloggers are millionaires from blogging alone! ;)
I didn’t participate in the survey but it looks like I fall in the 16% range for October. I did better this month.
However I make the majority of my money from affiliate marketing. Initially I started monetizing a few of my personal websites because I wanted to make some pocket change after a while I started making more than pocket change and started taking monetizing my personal websites as seriously as my regular business.
It’s taking me a lot of work but I’m enjoying it immensely.
This is the time when you really have to ask yourself that question again – would you still blog if you will not earn money from it.
On another point, I would be interested to know how long the respective bloggers in the different income brackets have been earning. It would be interesting to do a cross check, and also what percent of time they spend promoting their blog. However, that would require a full blown survey than a simple poll…
Oops, I meant how long the respective bloggers in the different income brackets have been BLOGGING.
Hi Darren,
Well… why most bloggers don’t make much money? I think it depends on the traffic ( Source, attitude..etc) and how much they spend to promote their sites. It need hard work to achieve more than $1000 earning from blogging.
Thank you
What’s the average?
It’s interesting and it’s encouraging to see that some folks are making quite a bit of money. It gives me hope that I might be able to do better in the future if I keep plugging away.
well…i’ve gained in september about $1200 from blogging thanks to 8 different “post providers” (i’ve worked about 1,5h hours a day to achieve this result)…bu this month just $200 (spending the same time, expecially for finding work!!). This becaose my pagerank…dropped from 4 to 0 (and i don’t use textlinkad and no direct connection to payperpost. Or better…on my blog there is no reference to paid reviews, just a little in the disclosure).
How very interesting. Although not many people are making a significant amount of money, it’s encouraging to see that some people do.
Just this week I put adverts on my two-year-old blog for the first time.
I’m on about $1.40 a day on average so far. It doesn’t seem like much, but considering I’m getting real money for something I’ve been doing for free anyway, it seems like mana from heaven right now.
Onwards and upwards.
It will also be interesting to know how the heavy hitters do it and how long have they been blogging to reach such heights.
I earn $0 because I don’t have any ads on my blog and it will probably stay so. My blog is new but has already over 50 visitors per day and that is good for 2 week blog!.
Advertising in early stage of blogging is bad, first you will turn your visitors away
1. you are new
2. don’t have much content 2 offer
3. you are new again
I think that majority on your graph that answered they earn more then $15K are lies.
I am very satisfied with the outcome tho from last and this year.
~Viva La LiveCrunch~
I am still in the larger group at around $2 per day, but it’s been rapidly growing for me. 3 months ago I was around $0.25 per day. Already now I am seeing $4-6 days becoming more common. I am not sure how long it will take to trend to real money, but hosting is costing me nothing now, and It’s a nice little bump to get a check for what most people agree we would do anyway. You’re right Adele, Onward and upward!
I’m starting to ramp up… but it’s still low to say the least. I guess I’ll have to keep reading here until it happens! :-)
Hey Darren,
I think a good idea to further this article and make it more helpful, would be to get an average ECPM that everyone is getting.
For example I have two blogs, one gets approximately 10x the pageviews of the other yet, because I’ve optimized the smaller one it makes a significantly higher ECPM and therefore actually more revenue per month.
I think this would lead into an interesting discussion on how to better monetize the blogs you currently own, and get some sort of scope on if you are leaving any funds on the table.
Anyhoot just my two cents,
Sara
It doesn’t surprise me there was a large gap in between the under $100 and $15,000. It seems like a lot of bloggers make quite a bit a month or not nearly enough each month. Then you have the ones in the middle aspiring to the top. I personally have never had success with making money from blogging.
Great info. you should have categories above 15k just to know how many earn more than 50k :-)
Mine has unfortunately dropped by about 50%. It was never all that high, but now it’s sitting on just $28, mostly due to Google’s pagerank changes, I believe.
It would be nice to list examples of sites from each income level so that we can compare income with design and/or subject matter.
Does higher income come from websites covering the same subject matter or is it divided equally between well designed and well written sites?
Hi Darren. Thanks for running this poll. It’s interesting — and informative. Yes, when I voted I needed clarification about the matter you mentioned – not making money because one is not trying or not making money because of failure — or even the newness of the blog. Despite the figures, I remain hopeful. :)
No money made here because there is no advertising — given the “adult” nature of the site. (It’s profanity-laden). But I recently discovered that there are indeed advertisers for “adult” content sites. They probably mean porn and not profanity. But I will be looking into this. I’d like to monetize the site. The poll was very useful. Thanks, Darren.
Well I do not make much blogging, but hey I have been doing it for 4 months and things are picking up. All the money I have made I have rolled back into advertising.
I make 1 dollar a day average!! Yeah!! Take that 33 cents a day!! Ha!!
I am being patient since my blog is relatively new. Hopefully, in another year, I can be in the $100-499 per month category. That is my first goal.
i make 2$ to 3$ per day (40$ in october) and “the 9%” make me dreaming…
I’m thinking about putting adsense on my blog
Paul: When I went to your site all of your google ads were for carriages and carriage rides when your site seems to be about independent travel. Maybe that’s why your income has dropped.
I think the sites that have the best opportunity to make money are those that are in a very small niche.or are discussing some type of consumer product (handbags, makeup, cars etc.) where the reader has a natural affinity to want to click on an ad on that page because they are already interested in the content.
I would be curious to find out if there is any correlations between blog earnings, and the blog host site / inde-blog. Would you mind including that in your next survey?
I’ve been blogging for a few years on different blogs and only recently decided to focus on a niche (although the “self-improvement” niche is, of course, already pretty competitive).
While my newest blog is brand new, I admit that I do hope to eventually earn some money from the blog; but to earn anything I have to put ads, links to products on Amazon and AdSense links in my posts which, I feel, unconsciously influences how and what I write . This is especially true because of AdSense, which seems to often display ads that are completely irrelevant or sometimes embarrassingly contradictory to the content. And I make, literally, pennies on it.
It feels like blogging is the new Internet Gold Rush and that, ultimately, there will be too many “top ten tips” blogs, or blogs about gadgets or celebrities — or even blogs about how to make money blogging where, like software companies or search engines, only a few will be the most popular and the rest will be imitators.
If the number of blogs is growing, will there be anything unique about one or another, over time?
Sabrina makes a great point. I have a music site that pulls Adsense ads for Psoriasis. Go figure. I’m going to play around with exclusion tags. I’ve had varying amounts of success with them.
I made $72 this week from blogging. Last week, my best week, I earned $150. The bulk of that is from sponsored posts though and Google just took cut the PageRank on the blog I use down to zero. That may have an effect on my earning power!
Looks like Digg likes this story: http://digg.com/tech_news/How_much_do_you_make_blogging_Problogger_Poll
If I’m a real estate agent, and I use my blog as my primary marketing tool for attracting clients, how am I supposed to answer this question?
Do I count the real estate commissions earned as “making money off my blog”?
Or are we talking strictly ads, paid reviews, etc.
I think you need to spread out the upper bracket more evenly as I find the results in the highest category hard to believe. Its more likely lies. If you estimated a spread out according to the reducing numbers as you move up the upper bracket, the distribution really isn’t even at all. You would have one very LONG tail in the distribution if it continues to drop, bracket by bracket as you move up in earnings.
I don’t think you can trust these responses but the distribution in the lower brackets is definitely more even and believable as far as the normal figures for money earning goes. I’m not planning to make significant money, but its nice to earn some and always have from other static websites, so a blog can obviously just add to those earnings.
I think amount of time blogging has a huge deal to do with how much a blogger earns on a monthly basis. Darren your own posts about income incrementally growing month after month when you started out confirms this.
I’m sure there are some new blogs that make serious money right away, but I’m willing to bet the operators have some experience if not with blogging then at least with general website optimization.
Thank you for posting this. I for one really appreciate this glimpse into a topic that is more often than not, shrouded in mystery. I would be interested to know what the highest earners blog about and what types of income steams are most successful for bloggers in general.
These numbers are still encouraging if the over 15k category were only half true even. I do aspire to make a living off of my blogging, but it is slow going. I don’t understand how some have been able to make $2 a day after only a month of blogging. That is very impressive to me. I really like this poll and can’t wait to see the next one. I hope I am in a much higher bracket next time. Keep up the good work Darren.
Thanks for providing the data. I just started trying to monetize my blog; I hope it starts to pay off soon. It would be a great passive income.
It would also be nice to know how much people expect to make. Someone who puts a few affiliate links in the sidebar of their hobby blog will be quite happy with $100. Someone who actually is trying to make money will not.
My only goal was to pay for my daughter’s homeschool resources, and so I’m quite happy with my monthly amount.
I want to make some money from blogging, but it’s not a specific focus of mine for my blog. I mainly do it because I enjoy sharing what I find on the internet.
Currently I barely make enough money a month to become rich, or to be called a part-time income, especially as my blog has been gaining in popularity in the 7 months that is has existed.
But currently my blog is self-sufficient. My money I gain from advertising is currently enough to pay for my hosting, which is a milestone for me !
Inspiring, to say the least. I will continue to build my blog on the philosophy that “content is king” with the hopes that enough people find it interesting enough to keep it afloat until I have a solid core audience. It’s very slow going to gain readership for a new blog, let alone revenue, so I say do your homework and understand the science, but ultimately….write because you love it.
does anybody know where to go and download a free pie chart?
To David:
On making $2 a day with a relatively new blog. Like Darren always says, to really make it in the blogging biz you have to be in it for the long haul. Asides from the obvious reasons that more great content means more readers, google searches, etc, the real value is how much you learn. You will learn how to optimize your site, how to pick niches you really enjoy yet also have good monetization outlets (think Chitika), and how much research you should really put in before starting a blog.
Long story short, it is possible. I’ve had blogs make $5/day after posting for a year and have had blogs make $5/day after posting for 1 month. So good luck, and when all else fails just keep writing.
I currently get just over 3000 uniques a day to my 1 year-old blog yet I would be lucky to make more than a dollar most days. Still make enough to pay off server costs luckily. Still trying to find a way to monetize my site, I’ll get there one day!
It’s interesting to see the spike in the graph around the $100-499 per month mark.
Do you reckon that this is becuase a lot of schemes have a $100 dollar pay out limit?
That may imply that a person that earning $100 this month didn’t earn $100 the month before. At the lower end of earnings, a blogger needs to think of what they earned since their last pay out as this may not get a cheque every month.
Also if you’re thinking about expanding the survey it’s be interesting to see earnings in relation to time spent per week.
I wonder if Widget Buck will have an influence on future survey figures as they have a $50 payout threshold.
I also have a similar poll on my blog too and I’m getting the same results as your poll in that the majority of people say that they are earning nothing to less than $10 a month.
I have to agree with you that they are just not trying hard enough. I know that it would be great to think that if you just put up a site or blog that you can start making a lot of money with it but it just doesn’t work out that way. It’s not a case of build it and they will come.
You have to work at it. So far this year I have managed to earn at least the $100 minimum needed to get an adsense payment the next month but that isn’t because I just made a site and then did nothing else with it – I constantly work on my site. And the fact that my site doesn’t generate millions of visitors each month should show that you don’t need that amount of visitors to make at least the minimum amount of money needed to get a payment the next month.
I have now come to the point where I have to pay taxes on my adsense income (of course that also means that I can take/claim some deductions as well).
I think that the majority of blogs (or websites) have the potential to make some adsense money. You just have to work on optimizing your site for adsense and you can do that and remain “true” to your blog (or site). You just have to work at it and that “work” doesn’t have to be all unpleasant.
Since I am an Adsense Consultant I have to show by example and that is exactly what I am doing with my (and my clients) sites.
PLEASE stop abusing bar charts like that! Use a histogram! (I’m sure I’ve made that comment before on these polls.)
I started my blog 10 days ago. One day i received more than 6000 visits from StumbleUpon. Wow!! really good you can think.. but I have earned $0. I tried Adsense, Affiliate products, etc, and nothing.. $0..
you can see my stats here
http://www.pachecus.com/i-have-received-6165-visits-in-1-day/
Thank you Darren for your blog
The more we stay on the blogosphere and the longer we try to make money, the more the money we earned.
That’s all that I got to say.
wow, nice stats, i wish i could be a part of the the bloggers who earned over 15k :) really nice, one day i am a part of this blogger :)
could the changes from year to year results reflect a change in readership?