Making its way around the blogosphere is the story of a blogger pulling down over $10K per month by having a couple blogs and putting up a ton of Google ads. Sweet, eh? So there are interesting things happening… but don’t quit your day job just yet.
A couple of things are happening here that’s going to make the next 5+ years very interesting, and there are some very, very cool opportunities about.
First, people are figuring out how to monetize traffic. A former CEO of mine many lives past once had the following analogy about traffic: Imagine if you had a football stadium full of people, every day. Surely, you could do something or provide something that these people wanted and make a living. But you wouldn’t have to spend anything on marketing and customer acquistion — they’re all right there! So that’s just more profit to you / lower prices to your customer.
Granted, he couldn’t quite monetize traffic all that well, so the company got bought. But the sentiment was right — if you have traffic, you’re already providing something of value to (at least most of) these people. Presumably, you could do more. The hard part is figuring out what more is, but lots of people, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google (with Google clearly in the lead) are going down the ad route — a tried and true venue for monetizing eyeballs.
Second, you’re seeing the Web slowly migrate from a self-help world to that vision of everyone, or at least millions of people, being an author. You’ll always have things like Amazon.com as a place to browse and buy, and maybe look at useful reviews. You’ll always have sites that provide great technical support because they’ve migrated their entire live call-center support to India. You’ll always be able to Turn Off the Internet (at least if you use IE… FireFox users, pranksters the entire lot, are thankfully prevented from pushing the Big Red Button).
But now, you’re getting people discovering things and posting them. News is a great example… you’re seeing lots of international news and political news coming through blogs very quickly. You’re also seeing product news, game hints, and nearly everything else coming out through blogs. It’s rather amazing.
So, you put together monetizing content + tons of authors and you start to get an interesting ecosystem. You’re starting to see a world where some solid entrepreneurs can actually write all day and make a good living doing it. Right now, it’s mostly an ad-based thing done by a few key people. But imagine the possibilities…
Something else to consider… and this is just a trick I use to help trend lines. Imagine who has time to do a ton of blogging, and could make use of the money, esp. at this stage of the game.
Seniors. Stay-at-home parents. Children.
There’s a lot of people out there with time on their hands, and often disposable income. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.
