Darren Rowse, who’s one of the hardest working bloggers I know, announced that in the last year he earned more than 100,000$ from AdSense! Congrats Darren!
These kinds of stories are inspiring, in both a positive and negative ways. On the positive side, it’s great to show that there’s decent money in blogs (broken down, about 50$/hour). On the negative side, most people will look at the numbers, quit their job and then fail.
Congrats to Darren, but to anyone who wants to chase him to 250,000$/year, realize that he’s spent 2 years doing this, at more than 12 hours per day (almost every day). He’s put the time in, and really deserves the reward.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:11 pm
That’s INSANITY.
Although, I found a quarter on the street one day while I was blogging from my cell phone. So, maybe, I guess it’s possible.
September 2nd, 2005 at 3:17 pm
At 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, the hourly rate only works out to around $33, not $50. Still a great amount of money for blogging though
September 3rd, 2005 at 8:19 am
That’s cool, time we start considering blogging as a full time job !
September 4th, 2005 at 3:28 am
Technically, this is not income “from blogging”, but income “from ads on a blog”. There is a huge difference.
Why anyone would click on an ad in a blog is beyond me. I ignore them and think they’re ugly and bad for credibility. While $100,000 from ads on a blog might be considered a good thing, I’d like to know what the customers think who clicked on the ads and bought whatever products were being promoted.
I offer my congratulations to Darren, but I have several other questions about this, and wonder why he would toot his horn about this. Is he promoting himself or is he promoting AdSense?
I like Darren, but I sure wonder about many things here.
September 4th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
Yeah, I read that thing too. It is a great achievement. I hope the good times last. Though, if I was him I would never have told that story to anybody.
September 6th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
I am really glad for his success. I think trying to profit from it via a “Six Figure Blogging” course or consultancy seems a bit suspect.
I agree with Steven’s point, the money is from the ads and not necessarily from his blogging. What keeps people coming back to his blog is his expertise but that is not necessarily what is bringing in the money. If people were paying for what they read, that would be a different story. Here is the point, you can’t teach expertise and you can’t teach people to be good writers – without those two, six figure blogging is not possible.
September 6th, 2005 at 4:24 pm
He writes a blog post. People visit. That results in traffic. Those people click ads. That makes him money.
Without blogging, there is no money.
In my mind, it’s blogging making the money.
But, you’re free to have a different opinion, of course. The only difference between what Darren’s doing and what journalists do (in terms of where the money comes from) is that journalists get ad dollars through the newspaper. Darren gets them directly.
September 10th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
A word of caution to all those in the long tail (like me) before jumping in to make same money on their own. There are 55 million blogs out there, how many make this kind of money? Blog for fun and for maintaining a conversation with your readers not as a profession. I have no more Ads in my TechBlog See some of my sobering articles in Category Blogging
September 10th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
Rags: I agree completely. While thousands of bloggers are now earning full-time salaries from blogging (this time last year I could count them on 2 hands), there are many millions who aren’t. And, really, blogging is just like any job: it takes a lot of work to make any real money.
It’s much more fun to just blog because you love it.