Written on December 20th, 2004 at 10:12 am by Darren Rowse

Gawker Has Record Traffic in November

Pro Blogging News 0 comments

Choire Sicha has a round up of Gawker Media’s Traffic for the month of November - the month saw an increase by 6 million page views from 23 million to 29 million (click to enlarge graph).

‘Gawker had a substantial gain in November, adding more than a million page views to the previous month’s total — and growing 42% over three months previous. Wonkette did quite well, a 15% growth in November on top of a 55% growth in October. Fleshbot had a rather astounding gain of 3 1/2 million page views. Defamer has sailed by the 2-million-views-per-month level. Gizmodo continues merrily, with just about 6 million page views in November.’

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Written on December 20th, 2004 at 09:12 am by Darren Rowse

On Comment Spammers

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Jeremy at WebproNews has an interesting article written after meeting some comment spammers.

Then a partial solution is fairly clear. I’ve heard and seen others discuss it over the past few months. The search engines needs to be smarter about reading and indexing content.

Read more at Some Comment Spammers Have Blogs Too

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Written on December 19th, 2004 at 09:12 pm by Darren Rowse

ecto blog: Special christmas discount!

Blogging Tools and Services 0 comments

ecto is offering a spacial Christmas discount on its amazing blogging software. I use ecto for MacOS 10.3 (windows version is also available) and absolutely LOVE it - it totally revolutionized my blogging experience when I stumbled upon it.

‘With ecto you can write and manage entries for your weblog(s). The advantage over using your weblog’s control panel is that you can compose entries offline and use the extra features ecto offers, such as spellcheck, creating links, attachments, and much more. ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.’

Get a list ectos features at:

- Mac version

- Windows version

The discount is valid between 20 - 26 December and is for a limited time only - get 30% off here.

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Written on December 19th, 2004 at 11:12 am by Darren Rowse

RSS and Blog Advertising Network - CrispAds

Advertising 3 comments

Just stumbled upon another Advertising program that has been designed specifically for RSS and Blogs called CrispAds. They promote it to bloggers as follows:

- Place ads in your blog articles when you want

- Ads also appear in your RSS or ATOM feed!

- 95% of advertiser click-thru revenues flow to you

- Get paid via Paypal at the end of every month

- Just generate code and place into blog article!

- Automated tracking system to track earnings

I haven’t talked to too many people using CrispAds yet but they seem to have most of the features that a blogger wanting to ad an income stream to their blog would want. One of the main advantages that this system has over an ad network like Adsense is the ability to run ads in RSS. I’m sure Adsense is working on this feature - but it could be a while.

On the down side I suspect that it will take a while for them to find a good stock of advertisers - but its a program worth trying. Following is a sample ad to give you an idea of what they look like.

update:Coincidentally Jen at Jensense has just posted a little review on Crisp Ads also. She writes:

‘But how well their ads would do when targeting non-blog keywords remain to be seen. Because unlike AdSense which contextually targets based on the page contents, CrispAds targets based on catagories submitted by advertisers, and matched up to the catagories a publisher submits for each blog. They do seem to be having difficulty attracting advertisers into the program.’

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Written on December 18th, 2004 at 08:12 am by Darren Rowse

Google’s Update Chaos Continues

Search Engine Optimization 2 comments

Google’s update seems to still be in full swing with chaos being reported on many sites. Check out this thread at Webmaster World to see the impact that some are reporting to their SERP results in Google and the resulting traffic effects. Preliminary results are seeing people reporting both good increases but also some pretty massive losses in traffic.

The results seem pretty diverse with bloggers that I’ve spoken with. Like everyone else they seem to be at the mercy of Google here and some are seeing little change whilst others are seeing both positive and negative swings.

Most of the wise advice around is that its too early to make a call on what impact Google’s update is having on any one individual site. Give things a few more days to see how things settle before making any huge changes to your blog’s SEO strategy.

How are things impacting your blog?

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Written on December 17th, 2004 at 06:12 pm by Darren Rowse

Media Buyer/Seller Wanted

Pro Blogging News 2 comments

I’m interested in chatting to anyone with a background in media buying/selling who would be willing to explore representing one or more of the blogs that I have an interest in.

Whilst I have a background in Marketing I do not have the time to give adequate attention to seeking advertisers for my larger blogs and am seeking expressions of interest from those with expertise in the area.

Specifically - I am interested in finding a major sponsor/s for Digital Photography Blog which had a monthly readership of 260,000 unique visitors in November and which should hit 400,000 unique visitors in December. I have previously sold banner space on this site but space has just opened up and I’m keen to find the right company to take it on.

If you are interested in selling advertising for this blog (and if it goes well others will follow) I would invite you to contact me with a brief outline of your experience and proposed strategy.

Payment for this service would be on a commission basis - ie I would be willing to share the revenue generated by you at a percentage to be negotiated.

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Written on December 17th, 2004 at 03:12 pm by Darren Rowse

Pro Blogger of the Year

Pro Blogging News 6 comments

It is that time of the year where bloggers everywhere are giving awards so I thought I’d ask the question - who is the ‘Pro Blogger’ of the Year?

This may not be an official award but I’m interested in people’s opinions and thoughts. What blogger (not blog) would you give the award to? And why?

Would you give it to one of the high profile bloggers like Nick Denton, Brian Alvey or Jason Calacanis who are experimenting with models of earning money directly from blogs?

Perhaps it would be one of those crazy creative bloggers who truely sold themselves to blogging this year, or Darren Barefoot.

Or would you give it to someone who is enabling bloggers to earn a few dollars from their site like Henry Copeland from Blog ads or even a blogger who is working to provide a blogging tool like Anil Dash from Six Apart.

Or maybe you have someone like Doc Searls, Jason Kottke, Steve Rubel or Jeff Jarvis in mind.

Or maybe its one of the many emerging enternetuserss who are quietly going about their business without blowing their own trumpet.

Who would you nominate and Why? What categories would you have if you were giving enternetusers awards. Perhaps if there is a big enough response we’ll run an inaugural enternetusers award early in 2005.

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Written on December 17th, 2004 at 09:12 am by Darren Rowse

Google Page Rank and Backlinks Update - Coming Soon

Pro Blogging News 1 comment

Are you waiting for the next page rank update from Google to move up their results page and bring you a flood of new traffic? (aren’t we all?) Well a little well places birdie told me last night that Google are getting close to an update - in fact a page rank update is scheduled for the days between Christmas and News Years and a backlinks update is scheduled for the first week of January (6th at this stage). Of course I’m not about to guarantee the dates - but my source generally knows what he’s talking about so I guess we’ll see in a couple of weeks.

Update - looks like my source was a little slow off the mark as the forums are alive with reports of an update currently under way with some saying they are seeing a big increase in traffic and others large losses. To this point we seem to be on the loss side but only time will tell. How is the update impacting your blog??

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Written on December 17th, 2004 at 08:12 am by Darren Rowse

The Twelve Days of New Media Christmas

Blog News 0 comments

Jordon Cooper has a good post titled The Twelve Days of a New Media Christmas which is choc a bloc full of new media goodies to make any new media junkie’s mouth water - ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas are upon us and our trees are full of “geese a layin”, “piper’s piping” and “partridges in their pear trees”. In other word nothing useful at all. Instead of braving the long return lines at Wal-Mart in the hope you can return seven swans a swimming, why not check out some of the programs and web servies listed below and have a new media new year. All of the programs help spread knowledge, ideas, or help you create some new ones.’

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Written on December 16th, 2004 at 05:12 pm by Darren Rowse

Blogs for Sale - How Much is Your Blog Worth?

Pro Blogging News 10 comments

One of the trends that I suspect we’ll see more of in 2005 and beyond is Blogs for Sale. This past year saw Jeremy Wright sell his blog which proved that its possible - but the question it leaves me wondering is - ‘How Much?’

How much would you sell your blog for? How would you determine the asking price?

I’ve done a bit of searching around on Google and so far haven’t found too much quality advice. So far the main opinion I’m seeing is that you either sell it based upon one or all of the following three characteristics:

1. Domain Name Value - If you’ve got yourself a highly sought after domain name you might be able to sell that alone - the buyer could scrap your site and build their own. In a sense this is like selling your home that is falling down knowing that the buyer will knock it down and build something else - they’re paying for the land. Domain name value can range incredibly - loans.com apparently sold for $3,000,000 for example….

2. Traffic - Most of us don’t have a domain of that high a value - but that doesn’t mean our blog is worthless. Traffic levels are obviously another method of determining the value of a site. Highly trafficked blogs obviously have a higher potential for earning than those with no readership. However determining the value of traffic is the tricky part. I’ve seen people value traffic at anything from $3 to $10 per hit per day. By this equation a blog with 1000 impressions per day would sell for anything between $3,000 to $10,000. The downfall of this approach is obviously that some traffic is more valuable than others. A blog that is personal in nature for instance might have 1000 daily impressions but they are harder to convert to income than a blog with 1000 impressions that writes on the topic of plasma screen TVs.

3. Earnings - a more logical approach to me would be to base your asking price upon current and projected earnings. To do this your blog will of course need to be earning something to start with. Again there are different opinions around the web as to how to use current earnings to assess a blog’s value. Some say you should expect 6 - 8 months earnings as a price (ie a blog with a daily income of $100 would sell for between $18,000 and $25,000), while others calculate a site’s value as being 2 years of current earnings (ie a blog earning $100 per day would be worth $73,000). Again this doesn’t really help much as there is such a huge difference between these methods of assessing value.

I suspect we’ll just have to wait and see what sort of figures are generated by sales over the next year or so. In the mean time however I’m very interested in how YOU would calculate your blog’s sale asking price? Leave your thoughts below in comments.

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