Blogging Is Not A Get Rich Quick Scheme

Over the years more and more people have been looking for ways to make money online. Many have turned to blogging. But how much money can you expect to make from a blog?

I addressed this topic back in 2008 in How Much Money Do Bloggers Make (analysis of a poll from Darren Rowse) and it turns out to be not that much for most. Now I'd like to address the same topic by looking at the stats of 7 of the 10 last blogs in tecnorati's top 100 blog list.

They're not the top of the list but also nothing to sneeze at either. Being in the top 100 when there are hundreds of millions of blogs out there is a very big accomplishment!

So let's look at what it takes to make the least, most popular blog and what type of success it has.

Least, Most Popular Blogs

The blogs that were at the bottom of the top 100 list that I used for this analysis are:

To Analyze the sites I looked up some key information about them including number of pages indexed on Google Search, age of the domain, Alexa Rank, and I pulled some stats from WebsiteOutlook.com which makes guesses on revenue and site worth based on publicly available information.

Domain Age

The blogs above had an average age of 8.8 years. The youngest two were thisiscolossal.com and droid-life.com which were 1.7 and 2.5 years old respectively.

Half of the blogs had domains that were almost 10 years old or older.

For comparison, the current top blog (huffingtonpost.com) is just over 7 years old.

While there might be some overnight success stories in the blogging world you're most likely going to have to invest a lot of time.

Number of Posts

To get an idea of the number of posts a blog had I did a search to find the number of pages Google had indexed in their search results.

This isn't an exact number but it's pretty close. The search results might be as much as 30% higher due to listing pages and other non post content but it doesn't make that much of a difference in this comparison.

The average number of index pages was about 78,800. Thisiscolossal.com was the lowest with 6,670 indexed pages and newser.com had by far the most with 299,000. Second from the top was theawl.com with 94,000.

On average these sites are publishing 28.5 blog posts a day. The lowest was michellemalkin.com with about 5 posts a day.

With 82 posts per day newser.com had the highest posting rate. Even without the top 2 highest posting sites, the average is still close to 20 per day.

Compare that to The Huffington Post which has almost 6 million indexed pages.

It takes a lot of typing to get to the bottom of the top!

Alexa Rank and Backlinks

According to Alexa.com which tracks usage statistics and other information on websites, the average Alexa Rank of these sites is 12,000. The lower the number the better.

Backlinks were an average of 6,400. The lowest was joemygod.blogspot.com with 2,500. On average these blogs are getting almost 4 backlinks a day with thisiscolossal.com getting over 8 a day.

The Huffington Post (current #1) has an Alexa Rank of 95 and 188,773 backlicks. over 72 a day.

So in between writing all those high quality blog posts make sure you spend lots of time cultivating good backlinks. This should happen organically if people find your content useful.

Page Views and Blog Ad Revenue

Page View and Blog Ad Revenue comes from WebsiteOutlook.com. It seems they base their assumptions mainly on Alexa Rank.

I don't consider the values to be accurate but they're interesting enough to throw them into the discussion. Depending on how each site decides to monetize it's traffic the values could be very different. There are also other ways to generate revenue from having a successful blog and the following values from WebsiteOutlook only estimate on-page advertising using general assumptions on things like how much AdSense revenue is earned per visitor.

According to the data, the blogs are averaging only $287 per day with an average of 96,000 page views.

Looking at daily earnings divided by average posts per day the average is $18.50 per blog post.

michellemalkin.com, theawl.com and thisiscolossal.com had the highest earnings per daily post with values ranging from $22 to almost $40. The others were less than $7.00 per post per day.

WebsiteOutlook has the Huffington Post getting over 11 million page views a day with an estimated daily earnings of $35,000.

Blogging is Not A Get Rich Quick Scheme

The reason blogging isn't a get rich quick scheme is simply because the chances of you getting rich from it are very very small. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.

As you can see creating a popular blog takes a lot of work. It also takes a lot of time to grow the popularity of your blog.

If you do manage to squeak into the top 100 blogs on Technorati, your blog will be earning a decent amount but the traffic alone generally won't turn you into a millionaire. It probably won't even make you rich.

So if you decide to start a blog do so because you want to share your thoughts, not because you're hoping to make a fortune blogging.

If you invest the time necessary and are able to write quality, original content and stick with it for a while there's a chance you can get some monetary rewards from it. Just don't start picking out slips for your new yacht just yet!

Update: A conversation with SaltyDroid made me think my message wasn't clear. To put it in robo-speak.

Almost all blogs make zero money … no matter how hard you work on them … no matter how great you are … no matter how much more you deserve the attention than some hollowed out reality star with nothing useful to contribute or some lame ass mainstream journalist who refuses to do anything even vaguely resembling journalism.

I was pretty sure that was the conclusion people would come to after reading this so let me make it clearer.

What Chance Does Your Blog Have of Succeeding?

I have a bad habbit of including more details and less obsenities so in my own words...

Let's take a wider look at the whole Top 100 list and the estimated earnings based on website traffic alone. Again this data comes from WebsiteOutlook.com.

A great example of a power law graph where most of the traffic/money goes to a few of the leaders in the pack. Remeber this is still just a tiny subset of the more popular blogs.

I had to leave out some blogs whose estimates weren't available and I left out The Huffington Post because with an Estimated $12million annual revenues from traffic there was hardly anything visible in the chart.

These are among the top 100 blogs from Technorati. Their earnings estimate range from $12mil to $10k a year. Considering there are 100's of millions of blogs out there the above graph represents a fraction of a fraction of a percent. In essence, "Almost all blogs make zero money"