back of the envelope

Inspired by Kottke's retirement from professional bloggerdom, here are some quick back of the envelope calculations on what it would take to earn Kottke-style scratch as an ad-supported blogger (instead of one supported by 1,450 micropatrons).  You can use this as your guide to whether you should quit your job and join the New York Magazine aspirational set.

• Jason pulled in $39,900 from his campaign.  Let's throw in an extra $100 for a nice decent meal out to celebrate the end of your hard-blogged year, and put up a revenue target of an even $40k. 
• You're a blogger, not a sales person.  You're not hooked in with the cool kids, so The Deck ain't for you.  Your skill set's more in line with "copying and pasting JavaScript into my sidebar," so you go AdSense all the way.
• For arguments' sake, we'll say that you're able to pull down a $1.75 effective CPM (over the course of the year you average $1.75 in revenue for every 1,000 page views).  There is absolutely no guarantee that you'd actually be able to hit that; a healthy number for  a community generated content site could be targeted at $1 (especially after Google's cut).  But for argument's sake we'll say that over time your editorial integrity drives to something just this side of an automated blogbot, and you start targeting your content at things that people actually pay good money to advertise next to.

OK, here comes the hard part.  Math!  $40,000 at $1.75 per 1,000 page views means that you'll have to do north of 22.8 million page views in the year, or 1.9 million monthly, or approximately 64,000 a day.  Think you have it in you?

It doesn't take a math genius (like me!) to know that this calculation is highly influenced by the eCPM you think you could earn; if you think I'm off, post your calculation in the comments.[1]

[1] Obvious and transparent tactic to drive additional page views.

Comments

[Stewart]

I've never run adsense on a blog, but I'd be astonished if any personal non-high-keyword-price-topic-focussed blog could maintain an effective CPM** of more than $0.75 over the course of a year.

** In the biz, we are starting to use "RPM" or Revenue Per M(ille?) instead of ECPM to talk about average cost-per-click x CTR. Just FYI.

[Michael Sippey]

Stewart -- absolutely agree that a $1.75 price target is generous... Thus the slap at our fictional blogger's editorial integrity, and a presumed fast downward slide to high-keyword-price topics, to avoid a fast downward slide into bankruptcy.

[greg.org]

Glass half full, though, if you were actually hoping to garner that much online attention at this stage of the blogging game, wouldn't you have to either a) be slightly famous or have a readymade/natural following already, and/or b) focus on a topic with some degree of expertise anyway?

What's the demand for one more general purpose, "random musings" blog, after all? OTOH, a blog with nearly any focus at all would result in ads with higher CPC and, arguably, a higher "RPM." I know a relative niche blog (which AdSense TOS won't allow me to identify) that regularly gets a CPM of $5, with $7-10 for sustained stretches. No idea what the difference is, though.

[Kellan Elliott-McCrea]

Making no attempt what so ever to write on a particular topic beyond whats seems vaguely interesting as I dash off a post in a few spare moments my adsense monthly average eCPM is generally between $6-7.

Taking last month's eCPM ($6.76) I get the very doable goal of 16200 daily page views.

[voiceofbragg]

It can pay off if you do your research on the stuff that gets put on your site...