Monetising a Passion?
September 12, 2006 – 11:20 pm
I read a post last week on SEOmoz about Increasing Blog traffic. Some good points about what to consider especially for a new blog. One thing that stuck out to me was the comment about advertising
low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't.
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Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link
This stuck out for two reasons:
1. I have a couple of small one ad blocks on my internal pages of my tech blog which is the busiest part of my blog network, and to be honest whilst the Google Adsense referral link has gotten a few signups, the ads have had very few clicks.
2. I have adsense on my Food Blog which was originally set up to be an AIS.
After reading this and having a think I removed the more obtrusive ad that was embedded in my posts in my Tech blog, and just left one at the bottom of the post which I may or may not keep. And then after redoing the template on my food blog I altered the single post pages to just have one ad instead of the usual 4 after the post.
I then picked up on a post by Stu about monetising blogs and essentially annoying readers by doing so (full post). Reading through the comments it seems that good readers can take to heart a blogger's intent to monetise a blog. However Stu still raised the question, how to make money from his blog.
After reading the comments and the posts surrounding the subject I realised that to be honest I'd rather drop any adverts than lose a worthy reader. I think that trying to monetise a passion is possibly not a good idea. Why? Because you want to make a really good go of that passion, be it blogging or a site built around a subject that's close to your heart you want the best for the site and if that involves worthy readers or visitors then you want to keep them. Introducing advertising which then pushes these readers/visitors away knocks your site down a notch or two.
I can understand people wanting to monetise their blog, especially as their blog is probably one of the busiest sites on their portfolio, however I think a popular blog can be worth a lot more from regular visitors and inbound links for future projects than the few dollars (or cents) that the monetising may make.
Just for the record, I don't have a concern over paid posts or advertising. I subscribe to feeds so most on page advertising doesn't get seen and sponsored posts tend to get ignored. I just like giving my opinion in the most confusing manor going 
4 Responses to “Monetising a Passion?”
I think you make a great point, but my question to you is this:
If you take the advertising off your sites - would you be looking to monetize them in another way? Products perhaps? Or would you just let them be - and make money to pay the bills on other sites you have - and keep your sites that you are passionate about ad free?
By Empress on Sep 13, 2006
Well I already don't really make much money off the blogs anyhow so removing the ads wouldn't make a real impact on income.
I think that if I removed the advertising off my sites, or more specifically off my tech blog which is the busiest site and the best 'diving board' for anything else, then I would leave it ad free. Of course if I post about something where I have an affiliate link then I would still post that, but I'm happy to leave my real blogs ad free.
I think when it comes to products on blogs like ours Chance made a good post yesterday on blog monetisation ethics, about saying that an expert blog works well with their opinions and pushing a product which they give the trusted low down on, whereas until I make a success with something I don't feel like I can really push any product apart from mentioning it in passing.
By Sarah on Sep 13, 2006
What if those feeds started showing (more) ads?
By Will on Oct 17, 2006
Well because I don't have much time to read feeds and have a few to get through each day I tend to gloss over what's there, if it's of no interest (being paid or not) I tend to ignore it. I guess if a site had more than 50% paid posts that were of no interest to me I'd possibly rethink my subscription. It's hard to say until it happens, however I've not found any of the sites I'm interested in at present going too far for my liking
By Sarah on Oct 17, 2006