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):
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This chart shows the reported income by the group of bloggers who shared their income over the months of may, june, and july.
Not all bloggers share their income on a monthly basis (they should start doing it though :) some are just spots in the chart, while others for whom we have historic information we can show the trend in their income.
Now without Jhon Chow, and the rest of big money makers...
Any observations, or conclusions from these charts? (keep your day jobs?)
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Bloggers Income July 2007 Report - Most Popular Affiliate Programs
0 comments Published by gabouy on at 11:02 PM
The following chart shows the number of times each affiliate programs was referenced by the bloggers who shared their income.
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Bloggers Income July 2007 Report - Best Paying Affiliate Programs
0 comments Published by gabouy on at 9:56 PM
The following chart shows the average of the income values reported per affiliate program.
Of all the affiliate programs referenced this chart was created only taking into account those that were referenced by at least three bloggers.
Best Paying Affiliate Programs
The figures...
| Affiliate Program | Incomes Sum | Reference Count | Income Average |
| ReviewMe | 3115 | 7 | 445 |
| CashCrate | 1516.69 | 4 | 379.1725 |
| AdSense | 7605.99 | 23 | 330.69522 |
| Private Sales * | 1610 | 5 | 322 |
| Text Link Ads | 4232.87 | 14 | 302.34786 |
| Kontera | 1013.96 | 4 | 253.49 |
| SponsoredReviews.com | 970.5 | 5 | 194.1 |
| PayPerPost | 1366.09 | 9 | 151.78778 |
| Commission Junction | 401.62 | 4 | 100.405 |
| Linkworth | 659.18 | 7 | 94.168571 |
| Tips ** | 281.66 | 5 | 56.332 |
| Blogsvertise | 55 | 3 | 18.333333 |
| Amazon | 56.42 | 7 | 8.06 |
| AuctionAds | 13.05 | 8 | 1.63125 |
Income Sum being the addition of all the incomes generated by that program, as reported by the bloggers group of reference.
Reference Count stands for the number of bloggers that reported earnings for that particular program.
Average Income equals the total income reported divided by the number of times one program was referenced. Some bloggers reported the use of a program with zero earnings, this was taken into account.
(*)Private Sales stands for independent ads sales
(**)Tips stand for Buy my data collecting robot a Beer type of donations.
What do those numbers actually mean? It could be argued that a sample of 31 bloggers is not enough to pull any hard conclusions, and I'd agree. In my opinion these figures are a good hint about which affiliate programs are really paying the bills for bloggers today.
What do you think?
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Bloggers Income July 2007 Report - Earnings distribution
0 comments Published by gabouy on at 9:27 PM
The following chart presents how the income is distributed among all the bloggers taken as reference. This results are a bit different from those shown by Darren Rowse on one of his polls. He had a bigger sample group, I take his results are more accurate.
Still the number of bloggers who receive the highest earnings is very small, about 12.5 percent.
I hope more bloggers may be willing to share their income in a near future, even those who may not be that proud of their numbers yet. If you become a blogger who shares, please let me know so I can add you to the crawling schedule, of "my collecting robot".
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This list was assembled from the collected data of 31 bloggers who are sharing their blog income. Most of them do it on a monthly basis.
Are you a blogger who shares? Do you want to be added to next month's ranking? Then email me (glr[at]gabouy.com) with your blog details, and you'll be added to my "collecting robot" schedule.
Check which are the best paying affiliate programs on average!
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