Written on November 3rd, 2004 at 08:11 am by Darren Rowse
Do hits matter?
‘The problem with blogs that are only intended to attract traffic is that they can’t survive in the long-run. Traffic statistics keep bloggers going for a while, but the numbers eventually stabilise: there can only be a 100,000 most popular 100,000 websites. The world just doesn’t have enough internet users to support millions of traffic-seeking blogs.’
I just read an interesting article in The Age newspaper about blogging and the reliance upon hits to make it a profitable enterprise. Its a bit of a no brainer really - although I’d disagree that its ALL about hit levels. They write:
‘The few bloggers who try to transform hits into returns invariably focus on ad revenue. Unfortunately, ads cannot sustain millions of blogs, and never will. Some simple math makes this painfully clear. If five percent of a blog’s visitors contribute 25 cents in ad revenue each, it will take 100,000 visitors a month just to make $1250.’
Ok - thats good analysis - if you’re going to make reasonable money blogging about a topic that pays 25 cents per click you do need a lot of hits. However if you are blogging about a topic that pays 50 cents per hit - or even $2-$10 a hit you need a whole heap less traffic.
I have a number of blogs - some are obviously more profitable than others - some rely upon lots of traffic, others do not. Traffic obviously helps them all - increase it at any pay per click level and you’ll increase your earnings - but also be smart about your topics and income stream choices and you can also do pretty well with average hit levels.
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