Bloggers find ways to profit

Web logs, or blogs, which started out as a labor of love, are becoming a moneymaker for writers who are selling advertising on their sites.

Some top bloggers who carry advertising say they make hundreds or, in a few cases, thousands of dollars a month. The typical take is more like $20 to $50 a month, which covers the cost of running a typical Web site.

A blog is an online journal typically written by an individual. Some are devoted to single topics, such as pets, poets or politics. Others are stream- of-consciousness musings on anything and everything. Most blogs are updated daily and feature links to other blogs.

The premiere of easy-to-use blogging software has increased their popularity.

Technorati, a San Francisco research company, says there are about 2.5 million blogs, with 10,000 being created each day.

The Pew Research Center estimates that between 2 and 7 percent of adult Internet users write a blog, and 11 percent visit blogs.

Although blogs have been around for about five years, it is only in the last year or two that advertising has been popping up on them.

The percentage of blogs that have ads is still quite low, but it is likely to grow now that companies like Google are making it easy for bloggers and advertisers to connect.

Bloggers whose readership consists of a few dozen friends and family, the usual case, are not likely to attract advertisers.

To lure ads, bloggers say a site should be about a specific product or subject. Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, says people who want to sell ads on their blogs should plan to work on them hours a day for at least 18 months to develop a following.

"This doesn't happen overnight. You have to build a voice, a relationship, " he says.

Some people fear advertising will corrupt blogging and encourage bloggers to write for money, not passion.

"The presence of advertising clearly pollutes the simplicity of the relationship between the writer and the reader. But I think it would be really simplistic and indefensible to argue this is a unique problem in the blogging space," says Tim Bray, a blogger whose day job is director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems.

Thanks to the Internet, "you can now self-publish. If you can build an audience, you can get paid for it," Bray says.

Here's a look at three different ways bloggers can make money:

Blogads: Blogads is a small North Carolina company run by Copeland.

Advertisers go to www.blogads.com and choose the sites they want to appear on. Prices range from $5 a week on Heretical Ideas to $700 a week on Daily Kos.

Most sites cost $20 to $50 a week, with discounts for monthly contracts. Blogads gets 20 percent of the rate; the blog gets the rest.

Blogads has a lot of political bloggers and advertisers.

Glenn Reynolds, a law professor who runs the libertarian blog Instapundit. com, starting running Blogads three months ago.

Reynolds says he's been pleasantly surprised at the results. Ads on his site cost $375 a week ($1,000 a month), and he made $4,000 in each of the last two months.

"I don't think I'll make that much this month. There's an initial wave of excitement which is likely to phase out," he says.

His site gets about 150,000 page views and 110,000 visits per day.

Reynolds and his wife even appear in one of his advertiser's ads, wearing the advertiser's "conservative T-shirts."

Google Adsense: Instead of selling ads on specific sites, Google Adsense sells ads linked to certain words that appear in the content of sites.

Bloggers say they like this approach because it provides relatively unobtrusive ads their readers might want to see.

Bray joined the Google Network by inserting some code on his blog, www.tbray.org/ongoing. That took about 15 minutes.

Among other things, Bray's site features a lot of flower photography. Now when visitors go to a page about flowers, they might see an ad for ordering tulips online, he says.

Advertisers pay Google each time a user clicks on their ads. Google gives a portion of this revenue to the site where the ad appears. Google won't disclose its prices or revenue share, and it forbids bloggers from disclosing them.

Bray says he makes about $200 to $500 a month from Google ads, after subtracting his Web hosting charges, which he won't disclose.

The average site pays $10 to $15 a month for Web hosting, although popular ones pay $50 to $100 or more.

Matthew Haughey, who runs Google ads on his TiVo-related Web site, pvr. blogs.com, says, "I'm making hundreds of dollars a month, but most people are making $5 a week."

Because Google is preparing to go public, it would not comment on Adsense. Its prospectus discloses that Adsense is a fast-growing part of its business, but it is less profitable than the advertising Google sells on its own search site.

Amazon Associates: While technically not advertising, Amazon. com has offered bloggers and other Web sites a way to make money since 1996 through its Associates program.

Sites that join the program link content on their site to books, consumer electronics and other products sold on Amazon. If a visitor clicks on the link and buys the product, the Web site gets a percentage of the revenue. This cut has been as high as 15 percent but is currently 2.5 to 10 percent, depending on the product. New York City blogger Jason Kottke, who runs www.kottke.org, participates in the program. No ads show up on his site, but if visitors click on a book or DVD he writes about, they may be transported to Amazon.com.

"I point to Amazon because it is informative," says Kottke. "I get maybe $100 a month from the Amazon links, sometimes less. It depends on how many books I'm reading or DVDs I'm watching."