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April Earnings Update

Posted By Darren Rowse 12th of May 2006 ProBlogger Site News 0 Comments

April’s earnings totals are coming in this week and I thought I’d give a bit of an update as to what the month looked like in terms of earnings for my personal blogs (note the points of clarification below).

I’ve ranked the main income sources that I’m involved with from highest earners to lowest earners (see graph below – click to enlarge):

  1. AdSense – 32%
  2. Chitika eMiniMalls (aff) – 28%
  3. Miscellaneous Affilaite Programs – 17%
  4. Private Banner Ad Deal – 11%
  5. Text-Link-Ads (aff) – 5%
  6. Six Figure Blogging Sales – 3%
  7. Amazon – 2%
  8. Miscellaneous Ad Programs (includes Feedburner RSS, BlogAds, Adbrite (aff), ValueClick) – 2%

Points of Clarification:

  • the Chitika eMiniMalls figure is an estimate of what the audited figures are likely to be based upon the last few months auditing percentages (for me it’s been in the 12 – 18% range).
  • the total income for April is over five figures for the month.
  • these figures do not include a little consulting work that I’ve picked up in the last month or so (not a major focus for me at this point).
  • these figures are earnings from across my own personal blogs and do not include earnings from b5media (which includes ProBlogger). To this point as b5 owners we’ve not drawn any earnings out of the company.
  • these figures are before I pay any outgoings (ie I have one blogger that I pay on a a revenue share basis for a couple of my blogs and I pay someone to find advertising for me). Total outgoings are probably around 10% of the income.

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About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. 5 figures of Australian dollars or US dollars? Either way that’s a nice number.

  2. You probably made this month what I made total for all of 2005.. Lol

  3. When you say ‘over 5 figures’ do you mean that you are clearing 6 figures as in $100,000 or more per month, or do you mean somewhere between 10K and 100K per month.

    It migth be time for you to change the name of your course from Six Figure Blogging to Seven Figure Blogging.

  4. >

    Any non-private interesting reason for this? :) I just can’t see why you’d be pooling the revenue on a blog network unless you’re planning to acquire some other blogs or set up a whole ton of new blogs with paid bloggers, of course ;-)

  5. BTW, I was quoting the line about “not drawing any earnings” from b5media for my post above :)

  6. grant – USD

    Robb D – I mean between $10k and $100,000 – I’m still quite a way off 7 figures in a year :-)

    Peter – from what I know most new businesses don’t draw money out for quite some time. While the network is making decent money we’re investing our share back int as there are quite a few expenses in the early days of setting up servers, design and administration.

  7. Darren, if this is too personal, please disregard. But if you can answer it I would be appreciative.

    I know you have a strong chitika referral income, out of the chitika, what percentage is from your sites and what percentage is from referral income from others?

    We have almost closed down chitika on our sites as it has not been performing at all. I figure it is because it does not align with our direction.

    Thanks

  8. Tom – the figures above for Chitika are 100% direct earnings from the ads. The referral income is one part (one of quite a few programs that I use) of the ‘Miscellaneous Affilaite Programs’ category. The referrals from Chitika do ok for me but they are by no means massive in comparison to the total income that I earn each month.

  9. So I was just wondering… How much of this goes on tax? Are you set up as a Sole Trader? I’m intrigued by this business side of things, how you account for earnings and the like….?
    (i am the king of malformed questions)

  10. Hey, I read about you in the greenguide yesterday…
    How many months (or years) did it take you to build up your reader base and revenue?

    I’ve created a stocktrading diary that has been going for almost 2 months now – but I earn about $2 a week or less on ad revenue!

    thanks

  11. gizo – I was a sole trader til earlier in the year when we went to a company model. It’s complicated and I don’t tend to discuss the details on the blog (it makes my head hurt) but I do pay tax and pay quite a bit of it (although our federal budget this week will save us a bit!).

    Andy – I’ve been blogging for 3 years. You can read about the story from woe to go here.

  12. Darren,
    Your blog is an inspiration to us all on how to get the blog to generate revenue. I know that this is not the main purpose for which we started blogging but it does give me a good answer when asked about the $4 i made our of my blog http://ohad-news.blogspot.com in the last 2 month :)

    Ohad

  13. […] So, when the ProBlogger, Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger.net fame published his April earnings update recently, I dropped everything else I was doing I delved into his blog. […]

  14. Hi Darren .. if you don’t mind my asking … what exactly does a person who is paid to “find advertising for you” mean? If that just means a broker … then I’ll add “which portion of your revenues does this person contribute towards?”

    My first guess would be the private banner deal .. I am curious, … but if that’s too personal – never mind.

    Thanks for sharing :) I guess you realize that half the people hate you for making so much and the other half are inspired to compete (I might waffle into both sections at different times). It’s nice to see the graph as a reminder … it’s good to spread it around and not keep all your eggs in one basket.

  15. Oh.. on a related topic – I just noticed the “Related Posts” link that listed your April 2005 earnings update .. when you first hit 5-figures .. I thought for sure you would be at 6 figures by now per month :P … maybe next April 2007!

  16. Darren –

    Am I reading you correctly – your April income from Chitika (28%) is from readers clicking on the eMiniMall ads and not from the Chitika Affiliate/Referral program?

    Thanks.

    – Gary

  17. […] Darren posts his April Earnings Report. Proof enough to diversify your blog’s sources of income. […]

  18. Hart, I often wonder about the half you say that hate Darren for making money … damn it, how dare he make money! :-)

    Those kind of people, sorry, simply have a gripe and are just plain envious and/or too lazy to do the hard yards to get to where someone like Darren is at.

    I’m no “me too” commenter, I don’t alway agree with everything he does but give the guy credit – he’s no doubt the leading authority on making money via blogging by far, imo. Also helps that he communicates extremey well here – it’s hard to find a mean/snarky word coming out from him. I’m still waiting when he lets it rip on someone or some issue. :-)

  19. Martin .. about those other half.. I think I have a theory .. The old saying that “the rich get richer” is quite true .. because it affords them opportunities that others just do not have. For instance .. when I first started coming here, the feedburner count was in the 400’s .. Now if Darren coughs, I bet he gets 20 emails with a preliminary diagnosis. Have you been reading that photography school? It’s awesome and will do great because it’s so awesom. But, promoting it with a few mentions on this blog, that subscribes today about 6300 is something you or I cannot do, if we had a similar blog or product.

    Yes. That may make me envious at times, but that’s all I meant by waffling over the fence at times .. I am never angry or hateful and quite the opposite, being inspired and motivated, to make this blogging work .. No.. I do not have a picture of Darren with rings on it and throw darts at the wall trying to get a bullseye!

  20. Hart, I never think of you as the envious type…

    You’re right. Success breeds success. When you can leverage your past and current successes onto your new ventures you’re quickly one step ahead. That’s basically smart business. Why do it all over again.

    In my own small way (a very small way), I’m leveraging my past success with HomeOfficeVoice and using that as a leverage into new projects. In my situation, it has probaly cut off 3-6 months of hard work getting my new projects up and running.

    One way that Darren can (and probably is) leveraging this blog is by seeking out views on topics from his fan base – almost like a personal focus group. Example: his recent post about the AdBrite Inline ads. By posting it he can sense the mood out there. And if he had any thoughts about using those ads, the “focus group” probably would have swayed him against it. I guess that’s one of the perks of being successful.

    Now Photography is not really my thing, but a quick glance over there and you see the quality. Interested to read where/how he’s going with it. Going vertical in his niche is obviously a smart move. I hope he keeps posting about it’s progress.

    I have some pictures of folks I love to hate that I throw virtual darts at but Darren’s not one of them. :-)

  21. Wow.. 5 figure in a month.. That is quite an inspiration for my newly started adsense campaign :)

  22. Hart – the person helps source some private ad banners deals.

    Gary – yes my April income from Chitika (28%) is from readers clicking on the eMiniMall ads and not from the Chitika Affiliate/Referral program

  23. […] Income diversification By 2cworth Steve’s post on Adsense Earnings highlighted Darren Rowse’s April Earnings Update – Apart from the total take (indicated as a five figure amount less outgoings), the noteworthy element is that it’s distributed across multiple sources of inflow – the single largest source is Adsense, but that’s not more than a third of the total. […]

  24. I was surprised to see that AdBrite and ValueClick scored so low. Maybe you should try FastClick.
    —————–
    logviewer.net: http://www.logviewer.net
    theblogclub.net: http://www.theblogclub.net
    —————–

  25. Valueclick is Fastclick. They merged a few months back.

  26. Darren, where do you put the text-link-ads on your site? I can’t find any.

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