Weblogs Inc is said to earn $600 per day from Adsense. PaidContent writes:
‘Weblogs Inc., described as the largest publisher of professional blogs, was offered as an example of how AdSense benfits online publishers. According to the slide, Weblogs is averaging $600 a day in AdSense revenue and made $45,000 in the first four months; the blogging company added AdSense in late August 2004.’
At first I was actually a little surprised by the $600 figure – with 70 blogs (an average of $8.50 per day per blog) who do a total of 20 million monthly page views (they therefore earn 0.0009 cents per impressions. From my experience with the program I would have thought the figure would have been significantly higher than that.
However it is also worth noting that Adsense is not their main source of income. For example look at Engadget and you’ll see that the prime position ads are all private ads and Adsense advertising does not appear above the fold. I deduce (guess) that these ads are paying better than the Adsense ads would in those positions.
The strategy that I use in placing ads on my site is that I put the highest paying ads in the prime position. If an advertiser wants to pay more than Adsense can earn in a position I am willing to sell them that space and move Adsense to another spot – I presume that this is how Weblogs Inc operates also so we can guess that the $600 per day from Adsense is perhaps only the minority of their earnings.
A valuable service would be one which was able to track the earnings of different ad campaigns in various ad postions on a given site regardless of who is providing the advertising.
Yes $600 a day is not much at all when you consider their traffic levels. Though, their niches aren’t the most profitable (from a cpc point of view) and as you mentioned, they are hidden below the fold.
Actually I find “prime position” isn’t always best for adsense. I use one after the main content on a high-traffic page (definitely below the fold on some browsers) and it gets a pretty good click-thru rate. Adsense in the main 468 x 60 banner spot at the top of the page, on the other hand, gets virtually no clicks.
I think WIN uses Adsense in that spot because it’s a good place for clicks, and adsense is all about the clicks. (I imagine the other ads that are in higher positions are CPM, or they’re flashy and graphic and more visible than a text ad.)
I know they sell some ads directly, and I’m sure that’s worth way more than Adsense.
Disclaimer: just my opinion. I write for WIN but otherwise I’m clueless about the company…
Hey Darren. Am I missing something? Isn’t is against the Google terms of service to reveal how much cashola you’ve made through Adsense?
Whoops – sorry – just realized they were an example at Google Analyst Day.
I’ve been following Weblogsinc since its inception, and the figure doesn’t suprise me at all, and the comments are correct, the bulk would only be coming from say only 10 of the weblogsinc sites, Calacanis has admitted some errors recently with some of the blogs, but only the smaller number have broken through. Of this again I’d say Engadget would then be the top of the pack. I do wonder how he is able to pay the bloggers of some of the smaller blogs though, the ones that aren’t stiching up private ad deals and bringing in Adsense revenue. Whether we might se some consolidatoin or blog sell offs here in the future is yet to be seen.
All good quesitons… some answers for ya…
1. we are paying many writers on flat-rate now… most in fact. So, we lose money while the blogs build traffic. so, no need to worry about smaller/newer blogs not making money.
2. we run $4-12CPM displays first–of course! So, you’re going to see times when there are no google ad sense ads on the top level of Engadget (40% of our traffic), and autoblog (5-10% of our traffic right now. I suspect if we did just adsense we could double the number google quoted… mabye triple.
3. it is best to have a mix of these networks we find… Tribal Fusion is ok, fast click and burst are horrible but we still run them a little to make spare change. We are looking at a couple of other networks right now.
all the best jason
I wonder what the net is? How are his bloggers paid? Is it a revenue sharing agreement with the content providers? Do the bloggers get a portion of the ad revenue in exchange for their efforts? Can this really develop into something that actually leads to paycheck on par with a decent freelance job?
That’s really hard to believe… I would figure they would make way more than $600/day. Obviously they need some help! I could double it in one day if they let me.
this is a post that is over a year old James – pretty sure they’re earning a bit more now after almost 18 months :-)