The $15,000-$18,000 a month is for what appears to be the most successful blog, which claims to get 1.5 million unique visitors a month. That’s the very top, not the top 10%.

Trainwreck,

Yes, the subscription service is a problem I am well aware of. It turns out that a full subscription (RSS) allows bots to scrape the the entire site easily, which is a real negative. I may switch to a partial subscription (you get the first couple of paragraphs in RSS).

Anon 0f 12:04 PM,

The placement of the ads in under our control; what the services put there is another matter. I put up an article that analyzed how the Republicans had painted themselves in a corner ideologically. We then got Anne Coulter ads showing up! Yikes!

The problem is that the obnoxiously placed ads get more clicks. Intrusive is more successful.

I believe that blogging only makes sense within the context of a larger site.

No single blogger can sustain him/herself over time. The effort involved in proving timely, pertinent insight is simply too much for a single person or even a duo as in the case of Tanta and CR.

As you know very well, every time you don’t blog for a day or more, your blog traffic drops precipitously. Don’t even contemplate a real vacation.

If you would like, I wouldn’t mind sharing some of my ideas, however modest, with you in a different forum.

Also note that your RSS feed does not contain any ads and is therefore definitely a lost revenue source.

There really is no paradox in the fact that a blog with business content has an association with advertising or revenue related opportunities. Business is about exploiting opportunities, but the paradox with blogs like yours is in the balance between focusing on quality content or to become a slut and just prostitute yourself to more Johns in an all out effort to turn more tricks for the man — which of course results in a worn out bag that has very little future value or utility.

Your concern therefore relating to aesthetics can go towards extreme makeovers which also takes away time from your content, much like an older hooker that needs to put on more makeup. The joke at Calculatedrisk is related to putting lipsticks on (mortgage) pigs, thus IMHO, your situation seems to be a matter of coming to terms with becoming the proprietor of a well run cathouse, which offers nice content and revenue, but allows you to focus on your focused primary area of expertise — and then let the other things fall into place.

Perhaps one should study cathouse economics and look at statistics related to traffic flow patterns, i.e, do these ads at your cathouse attract more business, or do they impair it. One must study relationships on why cutomers are coming to your cathouse; there must be attractions which drive people in a sustainable, meaningful way, versus becoming lazy and hoping advertising will result in future cash flow. Your customers IMHO, are coming here for your content and thus one should be careful to not drive them away to other cat houses which offer less noise.

As is, your house here is fine place to drink vodka and enjoy synthetic derivative show explode, we need more fireworks, more vodka, more content….screw the advertiser pigs, but I see no conflict or paradox if this is kept in balance!

Na zdorovje

Just filthy: http://www.tribalfusion.com/channels/sitelist.html?adPropId=124&dataId=124

I can not believe Calculatedrisk is part of this, and now you…you.you.you

Im so pissed Im gonna start my own thing, but I will link to your thing ….

I take that as an object lesson in your case this way: If not for content of sites like yours (not exclusively, but I seek news and information much more than porn), I’d have little or no use for the “series of tubes.” So then, why shouldn’t you be getting a cut of the pile of coins I and others cough up to our ISPs and carriers, as inefficient as they may be?

I suspect this may bump against “net-neutrality”, and I certainly don’t want to pay more than I already do for what I now get, but the fact is this: Some of us, whether by temperment, or parsimony, or nearly empty pockets, or all three (like me) hardly ever buy anything over the net or respond to advertising there (here.) (I did recently buy a copy of Tjalling Koopman’s “Three Essays…” from a Dutch site that was much cheaper than Amazon, but this is very much an exception and not a rule.) We’re the same people who, even if we watch commercial TV, never sit through commericals – that’s why the remote was invented. We grew up reading Thorstein Veblen and Vance Packard and Herbert Marcuse. We’d throw things at the TV when Friedman & Sowell did their Rowan & Martin… We suspect, always, that somebody is trying to dupe us. I, on the other hand, admit to being a free-rider on your blog..

In short, Mr. Smith, you suffer the contradictions of capitalism, as quaint as that phrase may seem in these times. Check out Alvin W. Gouldner’s “The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology” and his following book, “The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class” for predictions about your predicament…

But hey, what do I know? I’m just a wage slave marxist with a Ph.D. who tends a vineyard – literally, there’s nothing figurative about it.

That said, I very much appreciate what you do. I have learned more about finance capitalism from your posts and references and associated blogs and links than I would ever have believed I would had someone told me years ago that this is now on what I spend most my free time. I spend a few hours here trolling and linking and I get this sense of …”schadenfreud”…? conjoined with horror. I don’t believe there’s anything I can do about anything I’ve learned, but it sure is exhilerating when not exhausting. It’s kind of like watching a trainwreck, where all I can do is point and gawk and marvel and cringe… and fear for my children, and try to find more work…Anybody who can make someone feel like that is an artist….

Maybe Im being naive here, but these do produce revenue dont they? Thus the matter gets back to aesthetics, and in that narrow case, there is a cluttered look that hinders flow — but in reality, people jump from one story to another, so its fairly easy to ignore this clutter and just bypass ads. The other day I clicked on something about a new movie, and I kept waiting for some economic relationship, and now I know to not click on those time wasters.

Something to think about…

Great blog though.

(Mind you), watch Hupert Sauper’s “Darwin’s Nightmare” one rainy Sunday and think about the question of what’s worth what.

GRS