Blog revenues are hard to come by

In a comprehensive post on the US blogging scene, Trevor Butterworth presents a pessimistic view of blogging. I’m sure this article is going to generate lot of debate:

One blogger who would open his books suggests that fortunes are not being made by even the above-average site. Andrew Lienhard earned $1,100 last year by using Google’s ad service on his blog, jazzhouston.com, which has been running since 1996 and gets some 12,000 page visits a day.

After talking to various people in the new media world, it’s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics.

The problem is that few blogs do even that much traffic. According to the monitoring done by thetruthlaidbear.com, only two blogs get more than 1 million visitors a day and the numbers drop quickly after that: the 10th ranked blog for traffic gets around 120,000 visits; the 50th around 28,000; the 100th around 9,700; the 500th only 1,400 and the 1000th under 600. By contrast, the online edition of The New York Times had an average of 1.7 million visitors per weekday last November, according to the Nielsen ratings, and the physical paper a reach of 5 million people per weekday, according to Scarborough research.

If you are still interested in generating money through blogs, take this route.