gabo's ramblings down south

Following the example set by John Chow an ever increasing number of bloggers are sharing their monthly income (me among others). Now, why would anyone want to do that? Let’s see, sharing your monthly income has some benefits I can think of:

• It provides a point of reference for newcomers to the blogosphere, enabling them to build realistic expectations around potential revenue in blogging. In plain English meaning, helping newbies answer: how much money can I make with blogging?


• It creates buzz around your blog, talking about your monetization strategy allows others to get ideas, and to give ideas, providing useful tips you were not expecting


• It encourages others to come forward, and share their earnings as well, and if a reasonable number of bloggers buy into sharing their income, then we could do some statistics, and that’s when it gets really interesting, since we could answer some tricky questions, like:
  
  
  
  • How much money is an average joe making with blogging? and how is this number changing with time? Is this number increasing or decreasing?
  
  
  • What are the best paying affiliate programs out there? Which ones are the most popular? What’s the expected revenue per program? Sharing information, as a consumer of affiliate programs, puts pressure on the providers, hopefully making them improve their offerings.
  
  
  • How’s the income of a blogger affected over time? are there seasons to it?
  
  

These are questions that have been going on for a while, and even if we have good guesses for some of them we lack a good answers.

Who is sharing already? I could come up with a list of thirty one bloggers that have shared their income. Most of them do it on a monthly basis.

July 2007 Reports

I've created some reports based on the data published by the bloggers who shared their income. They are the following:

Blogger Earnings over time

Best Paying Affiliate Programs

Most Popular Affiliate Programs

Earnings Distribution

Bloggers Income Ranking

I want to collaborate. What do I have to do?

You only have to post your earnings in a monthly post published within the first ten days of the month. Contact me and I’ll add you to the crawl schedule of "my data collecting robot".

It is best that the posts be titled [Month –Year ] Income Report, or [Month – Year] Blog Earnings Report, and that figures are presented using a html table, like the following (it doesn’t have to be as horrible, though):