Blogging : where's the money?
Back in 2005, BusinessWeek (via Gapingvoid.com) had an article about blogs entitled "Blogs will change your business". Back then, blogs were said to be a "prerequisite". Were they really? Maybe, maybe not, that's not the point of this post. The article continues stating "blog power simply doesn't translate yet into big bucks. For now, it's running mostly on people's passion to communicate". That was 2 years ago, did that change a lot? Well, quite not much if you read this post from Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb : There's No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere. "Because of the power law, the long tail of the blogosphere is huge and so any individual blog is not easily discovered. That is, the chance that a random Internet surfer will find a blog that is part of the long tail is nearly zero. Whatever monetization means the blogger in the long tail settled on, be it Google AdSense or Amazon affiliate codes, it can only work on large volumes of traffic. "
That leaves us with an open question, is there at all any money to make in blogging? I am particularly interested in narrowing the question to the specifics of niche blogging such as an african oriented one. I am awaiting an answer from all of you. Alex Iskold made another recap of the various motivations bloggers may have. Who is blogging and why? Is the blogosphere in the digestion phase?
Maybe our friends at Africa2Point0 or Akopo could chime in and tell us about their experience in attempting to monetize their blog directly through ads or indirectly through consultancy for a newspaper. Of course, i am not asking to any of you to unveil me his personal strategy for success and wealth, but just to give us some insight regarding how to make money through blogging. I am not saying that the driving force behind your blogging is only money; being a regular reader I know there's a lot more behind your respective blogs, otherwise I would have skipped the reading a while ago.
The ultimate question being, how do you obtain critical mass that will allow you to leave your day job and leave from your posting? Quite frankly i don't think it's possible for me, at least i haven't put much effort trying to (not that I'd like to), I love my job and this exercise (quite unregular i must say) has always been a hobby and I'd like to keep it the way it is, both for you guys reading my scribbles (meaning no ads...) and for me (no constraint except speaking my mind).
To my own question "where's the money?" I would answer that I don't know. What I know is the pleasure that we (Christelle and I) had while writing 200 posts on Sanaga on various topics we care about, not even earning 25 CFA francs yet, but instead getting richer of a rather unique and wonderful experience. Writing for fun about the latest hotspots in Douala or Douk Saga's legacy is not only very long tail, it's priceless...
That leaves us with an open question, is there at all any money to make in blogging? I am particularly interested in narrowing the question to the specifics of niche blogging such as an african oriented one. I am awaiting an answer from all of you. Alex Iskold made another recap of the various motivations bloggers may have. Who is blogging and why? Is the blogosphere in the digestion phase?
Maybe our friends at Africa2Point0 or Akopo could chime in and tell us about their experience in attempting to monetize their blog directly through ads or indirectly through consultancy for a newspaper. Of course, i am not asking to any of you to unveil me his personal strategy for success and wealth, but just to give us some insight regarding how to make money through blogging. I am not saying that the driving force behind your blogging is only money; being a regular reader I know there's a lot more behind your respective blogs, otherwise I would have skipped the reading a while ago.
The ultimate question being, how do you obtain critical mass that will allow you to leave your day job and leave from your posting? Quite frankly i don't think it's possible for me, at least i haven't put much effort trying to (not that I'd like to), I love my job and this exercise (quite unregular i must say) has always been a hobby and I'd like to keep it the way it is, both for you guys reading my scribbles (meaning no ads...) and for me (no constraint except speaking my mind).
To my own question "where's the money?" I would answer that I don't know. What I know is the pleasure that we (Christelle and I) had while writing 200 posts on Sanaga on various topics we care about, not even earning 25 CFA francs yet, but instead getting richer of a rather unique and wonderful experience. Writing for fun about the latest hotspots in Douala or Douk Saga's legacy is not only very long tail, it's priceless...
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Commentaires
Let's take a look to the web-tv-blog of the famous (in france) and controversed "Karl Zero" :
http://leweb2zero.tv
He has a lot of page-views on his website, for being famous and controversed, and broadcasts media on his blog,
So he could on the other hand deal with media producers the rights to broadcast on his high traffic website...
Deal your fame ? May be that's at list one way of getting money out of a blog :)
Jamaal
When reading this post, I have remember a newspaper giving a ranking of some famous blogs in EUrope, mainly analyst blogs. From that point of view, I really thing direct incomes like advertisement one, are not really so important.
The most important remains the contents and therefore maybe beeing recognized and by that way, some bloggers could be assigned some topic analysis, what we call in France "Mission". But that is already too much.
Whatever your gain, keep blogging!
Peu de bloggeurs en vivent, ça c'est connu.
Par contre, qund on s'y prend bien, le blog peut être un moyen d'engranger des contacts qu'on aurait pu mettre des années à avoir en n'essayant des contacts offline.
Il faut aussi dire que les quelques bloggeurs sur Akopo ne sont pas très actifs, donc, ça explique la faiblesse des revenus Adsense actuels.
Ce n'est d'ailleurs pas dans mon intention de monétiser via Adsense, mais via une régie propre (car les publicités Adsense sont bien loin du quotidien d'un africain 'moyen').
Typiquement, une plateforme qui cible l'Afrique et présente des pubs sur SFR, ou Apple, c'est beau, mais ridicule.
Pour la régie interne, c'est encore prématuré de l'initier, et je suis focalisé sur l'augmentation du nombre de bloggeurs (actifs si possible).
En deça de 5.000 ou 10.000 bloggeurs, je ne sais pas si c'est pertinent de parler de monétisation, sauf à avoir (par pure chance ou hasard) uniquement des bloggeurs très actifs.
Les revenus Adsense actuels sont bien ridicules et puisque je suis pour la bonne gouvernance, eh bien les voici
http://img264.imageshack.us/my.php?image=akoporevenusqp5.jpg