(04-17-2024 05:33 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (04-17-2024 04:36 PM)Hokie Mark Wrote: "Retired or want a second income?"
If that is your goal then get a job at Taco Bell -- you'll make more in a week than the my blog makes in a year!
(I'd like to think mine is typical, and not that Google is cheating me out of thousands of dollars... right?)
Oh yeah - not that I wrote my blog for money, but the economics are simply not there for the written word on a non-subscription basis on the Internet. Doesn’t matter if it’s blogs or newspapers. I got a fair amount of traffic and it was essentially pocket change - it’s effectively impossible for anyone to make a living at it if you’re solely depending on views.
Essentially, you need to be able to sell subscriptions to make any decent amount of money (see Matt Brown’s paid newsletter). If you’re depending on views/impressions, you’re better off hitting it big in the YouTube and/or podcasting space and even then it’s going to require being at the 99.999th percentile compared to all of the other millions and millions of content creators spanning all genres.
Yeah, that's mostly the reality. You *can* potentially make a full time living running a free blog IF you sell all the ads yourself. That's very, very time consuming, but if your audience is concentrated in a particular market, or if they're part of very valuable niche demographics, you can earn ad revenues far beyond of what GoogleAds might produce. But there's no way anybody can make a real living, or honestly, even a real PT living, from just programmatic advertising. The bot traffic is too high, the payouts are too low, and the marketplace dominated by two companies who do not give a %#*)$# about publishers.
The best way to earn a living is from selling subscriptions to a niche audience. It is what I do, and honestly, I make more money running Extra Points than I ever did working full time at Vox (and WAY more than I made in newspapers). But I'm also able to do that because I can a) sell institutional subscriptions to universities and b) can rely on commissioners, ADs, collective operators and other high-income industry people to pay for subscriptions at a high rate. I'll probably change my product offerings this summer as well to chase more high-dollar customers.
Honestly, YouTube used to be the best place for independent publishers/creators to make money, but that gravy train is just about over now. Podcasts are starting to face the same data integrity problems that plague text publishing.
If the only people who paid for Extra Points were my regular fan readers...I wouldn't make enough to justify spending my full-time job on it.
I dont actually think any of the realignment-rumor professionals online make a full-time income from their hustle, although I bet they make enough part time money to certainly make it worth their time.
It's a tough hustle, that's for sure. Way, way harder than it was at the start of my career, and I imagine with the way the internet is going, it'll only get worse.