Ask YC: Monetizing your blogs?

Seth Godin pointed to a study from the AOL Global Advertising Strategy about who actually clicks on ads:<p>'Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit'<p>'Who are these "heavy clickers"? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.'<p><a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/your-ads-are-no.html" rel="nofollow">http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/your-ads-are...</a><p><a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/03/who_clicks_on_a.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/03/who_cli...</a>

I'm thinking of de-monetizing mine, as it just doesn't make much money (adsense), and a cleaner look might be nice. To actually make money, you have to write a lot about writing on your blog, or have massive amounts of users, or write about something that a lot of people click on ads about. Meaning that tech-savvy people, who are the best at ignoring ads, are a terrible audience.

I've made a small fortune monetizing my poker blog by creating poker-related services and leveraging the trust built with my audience. I still collect significant revenues from this with no ongoing effort beyond answering emails. In fact, though my traffic was never above 30k uniques a month, I made more profit than many blogs that have uniques in the low millions, though it was also more work than simply slapping on ads.<p>Even off of ad revenue I was making low 4 figures monthly just by selling them directly. At least in the poker niche, when your blog gets big enough advertisers seek you out. I don't have enough experience in other niches to know if the same is true.

I'd love to know the answer to this one. I've always sucked at monetizing and I get 300k pviews/month. I've attempted joining the larger tech blog ad networks but they pretty much won't talk to you until you hit 1M pviews/month. I'm not one for ugly advertising like adsense - just a personal thing, so I've started running those 125x125 ad blocks and various sponsorship things. They're hard to sell but if you can find the right companies and get decent traffic you can do alright. I sold my last 125x125 for $800 for a month.

For most blogs, just don't bother. You can make more money from getting your message out there and from linking to your other work than by advertising other people's stuff.

Presumably the people reading your blog have similar interests or circumstances to you. So you could ask yourself what kind of ads or other stuff you'd want to see if you were the reader.<p>YCombinator seems to be a good example of monetizing what is more or less a &#60;a href="http;//paulgraham.com"&#62;blog&#60;/a&#62;. I guess the generalization would be to start a business that you and your readers would like to use.<p>Other than that, I think there's a perception that web ads are sleazy and that clicking them will lead you to someone who is trying to rip you off. The ad either needs to be from a known company, look like it was made by real humans instead of a corporation, or be from sponsors you know the site owner has dealt with personally be cause s/he sells hir own ads. Come to think of it, maybe some of your readers have things they want to advertise.

Consideration 1: How many readers will go away if monetization feature X is added? Consideration 2: How much money will feature X make? Consideration 3: Does feature X fit in well with the rest of the blog?