The Wardman Wire

Maki over at Dosh Dosh has a case study of how one blogger occupied the Apple I-Phone niche fully 9 months before the phone is launched.

This will give readers here some insight how some people make money on the Internet.

This blogger set up a “iPhone Concept” website in October 2006, and has since had almost 1.5 million visitors to his site. The site made about $10,000 from Google adsense, and was put up for sale before the product itself has even been launched onto the market.

Dosh Dosh Case Study - Maki makes some good points:

The site was recently put up for sale by its owner and a thread on the Digital Point forum was created for an auction. The owner provided some very interesting details about the amount of traffic the site receives, along with its Adsense earnings.

According to the owner, he made $600 in 18 days within the month of June and nearly $10K in 8 months through Adsense alone. The blog also receives approximately an average of 5,432 unique visitors a day and I believe the bulk of it comes from search engines and links on other websites.

What is worth noting is that the website’s last blog post was 6 months ago so the income and traffic figures are passive and based entirely on old content with zero updates.

The article at Dosh Dosh is here. The thread in the Sitepoint Forums is here .

…and misses a couple of others in my view

• The site owner failed to do his homework properly. He selected a blog host that includes an explicit prohibition of selling websites in its terms and conditions. Therefore he was not able to accept a bid og $3500 for the site.In this case that reduced his earnings over the period from around $13,500 to around $10,000. That is a whopping 25%. Ouch! An expensive failiure to read the small print.

• Dig into the statistics for the site, and we see quite a far better picture than the “more than 1.4 million visitors” headline, in particular that the traffic is very peaky - using Unique Visitor figures, we find that:- 72.5% (1033927 from 1426557) of the traffic came in January, the most popular month.
  - 56.2% (802298 from 1426557) of the traffic came in the most popular week, also in January.
  - 27.7% (395969 from 1426557) of the traffic came in the most popular day, January10th.The peak was when the IPhone was officially announced. There may well be another one when it is actually launched onto the market.
• We can also see how little money is made from each unique visitor - in this case it was $0.007 dollar each, or about $7 (US) from each thousand visitors. This site was using exclusively Adsense, and the cost of creating the site was efectively nil. However, it does add up with enough traffic.

A Political Angle on this Case Study

A few brief thoughts:

• Number of Visitors
  The highest number of Unique Visitors in a day in this case study is (as far as I know) considerably higher than the number achieved by any UK Political Blog in any single MONTH.
• Monetisation of Political Blogs
  A lot of people make pin money or a little more from their political blogs. I’ll revisit this in another article, but I’m not aware of anyone One blogger who published the detail of his Adsense income and visitor figures isPart of that is because UK Political Blogs are both recent and small. It is also because not many political bloggers are very good at optimising their blog for making an income.
• Moving to the Next Level
  It seems to me that the next level of political blogging in the UK may come when the possibility of bloggers becoming “self-employed columnists” arises. At the moment I am not aware of anyone who is making a living solely off their political blog in this country. That limits the possibilty to “amateurs” and those with investment income - and we need to get beyond that situation.

Wrapping-Up

I will be following this article with a series about ways in which political blogs can be monetised, which will include a Case Study of a UK Political Blog which has published details of both its traffic volume and Adsense advertising income.

Tags: political blogging, monthly traffic, uk political blogging, monetisation[tags]political blogging, monthly traffic, uk political blogging, monetisation[/tags]