Detailed revenue breakdown of a gadget blog ($61k in dec 2007) | Hacker News Reader

Detailed revenue breakdown of a gadget blog ($61k in dec 2007)

selfmademinds.com

33 pointselsewhen19 comments

What's more likely: that you could have a startup generating revenue of $60K a month in 3 years or spend that time building traffic to some website for adsense and affiliate sales for the same?

Every time I put down my coding manuals to read some guide to Making Money Online™ I feel a little dirty, but damn it seems tempting and more achievable than building and selling a tech startup.

I can't get into too many details, but in the past 5 years, I did some consulting for a small company that did nothing but affiliate sales.

I don't know what their total revenue was, but I know that they were paying for 3 full-time consultants billing on the high-end, 1 graphic designer, a full-time accountant, a business manager, 3 SEO people (full time as well) and the owner.

So, there is definitely some money to be made there, I just don't know the actual ratios of blood, sweat and tears vs. sheer luck.

remember, this was for december 2007 which is probably the best revenue month for a gadget blog. i wouldnt be surprised if the average month was around half that.

That's still a lot of operating capital for whatever other ventures you wish to pursue. Figure $300K for the year... not bad, not bad at all.

What would really bother me with that business model is that you are highly dependent on your Google rank. You can lose all your revenues instantly if you are removed from the index or outranked by a competitor.

I disagree with this. A site like this isn't getting the bulk of their search traffic to their homepage. They have thousands of minor pages indexed for search terms that only a handful of people search for. Multiply this by 10,000 and you get their search traffic (long tail, blah blah blah) There's no "one page" that if there's a large rank drop will affect.

Note, this is very different than, for example, an e-commerce site that sells "widgets", and is ranking very well for the word "widgets". For them, a ranking drop could be devastating.

Now, that being said, they are dependent on Google for the bulk of their income... but there are worse things than tying your fortunes to Google's financial well being.

>>> building traffic to some website for adsense and affiliate sales for the same?

There are basically two main paths you might take here. I have a friend who made a fortune by spamming search engines, but his peak was about 6 years ago, when it was quite easy to game google for profit. Now he has about 1.000 (one thousand) interlinked domains with affiliate links. Of course, as Google algo improved, his sites are slowly de-ranked, but there is also MSN search and Yahoo, and his "imperium" is so big, that he already earned enough to live confortably for the rest of his life.

But anyway, he says that starting now this would be much harder, because Google already closed many gaps. It is doable, but much harder.

Another way is to use "white hat" way, i.e. building normal content like cool gadget blog. But this is also harder that it looks, especially to build "great team of 4 paid writers". Author don't elaborate more about that, but this I think is non-trivial. There need to be some unique vision plus writers who can execute it by writing engaging content.

Gem of an insight from the author in the comments:

"I totally agree and I expect very few clicks from regular readers. I expect what happens is that less techy people are searching for gifts at this time of year, they find the site and then there is a fair chance of the click. I also find Adsense on CG is especially well targeted (as it should be really)."

Lesson: Maybe technology-oriented sites can make money (but off of non-technology oriented people)

Matt Mullenweg once said they only serve ads on wordpress.com if the referrer comes from a search engine or similar. They didn't want to "punish" regular blog readers by throwing ads in their face. Nice concept, though I can't vouch for whether or not they actually do this...

its not too clear in the article, but the figures are for the coolest-gadgets.com blog.

I upvoted you, tried the link, and found out it doesn't resolve?

try http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/

works for me.

its not working for me either right now... you'd figure that someone making that kind of money would arrange for reliable web hosting.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/coolest-gadgets.com

It would be very interesting to to see the yearly profile and time and effort invested to determine the effort/reward ratio for blogs like this.

People are unlikely to provide such information on public sites (if at all), but it still would be nice to see.

I ask this as I dare say you could scrape certain ecommerce sites to automatically feed a blog based on a theme e.g. gadgets, and for little/no effort thereafter get a supplementary income source if you so wished ...thinking about it, there are probably many already doing this?

This is why splogs exist to do exactly that. However, there's a big difference in building an actual site and a splog site, and this is reflected in traffic and search engine ranking.

Getting that traffic is the trick.

You can scrape, but the difference is that you will not get many natural links from other sites, so google will not rank you high, nor will you have many returning visitors.

Whats the url of the "gadget blog"?

http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/

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