Posts Tagged ‘Blogs’

Posted on November 28, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

88% of SA Bloggers make no money

Alistair, the brains behind the SA Blog Survey, sent me a very interesting slide yesterday about the revenue that bloggers earn from their blogs. As most of you will know Afrigator was proud to be associated with the 24.com SA Blog survey and according to Alistair there were over 1,000 responses to the survey.

I think this is a pretty good response rate, all things considered, but for me the interesting bit was seeing that 88.4% of SA bloggers earn zero revenue from their blogs while the additional 11.6% earn no more than R3,000 a month.

As you can see, of the people who do earn money, the average a blogger makes is between R1 and R200 a month. 24.com have said that “blogging for the most part is not about making money” but I have to wonder if this isn’t because there hasn’t really been a viable method to earn revenue from blogs.

I have believed for a long time that bloggers don’t make money from their blogs not out of choice but simply because there hasn’t been a model that is tailored to them. I speak from experience since I’ve tried Google Adsense, Affiliate Marketing and various other forms of revenue generation and to be honest getting a cheque from Google once every six months for R750 just doesn’t cut it for me.

Most blogs don’t generate that much traffic so PPC and CPA are models that simply don’t work. These are great revenue streams if you’re generating 1 million plus impressions but if you’re only doing 5,000 it becomes a lot more difficult to make any real money.

I think this slide further validates my position on launching Adgator into the SA market. As with Afrigator, everything we’ve done has been based on our own personal experiences and Adgator is no different. There is a lot of money being thrown around in online advertising and I think it’s time bloggers shared in the revenue.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t like advertising that much and the thought of bombarding my limited readership with dodgy ads is not something I take lightly however I do feel that if the value proposition is right then I’d be happy to dedicated a spot on my site. If I can truly see earning potential then I’d take the plunge because R750 a month is a lot better than R750 every six.

Adgator has been doing phenomenally well since we launched it some two weeks ago and the good news for bloggers and advertisers is that we’ve just finished building the backend interfaces. This means bloggers and advertisers who’ve shown an interest and/or signed up will be getting login details to monitor their earnings and track campaigns.

Adgator has been an unbelievable learning experience. While we may have honestly believed we were ready for a launch I know now that there was no way we could have prepared ourselves for the massive uptake of the program. That said, the technology is now complete, we have most of the data we need and we have an exciting advertiser coming on board from 8 December. Money will start to filter through to the bloggers who’ve signed up and the earning potential is going to increase considerably in the new year.

I know that guys have itchy feet but in the coming months the average money earned by a blogger through Adgator is going to be a lot higher than R200! I can’t wait to see the blog survey stats this time next year…

 

Posted on October 28, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

State of the Afrosphere – my presentation at 27dinner Cape Town

Here is my short presentation I gave last night at my first Cape Town 27dinner. I tried to have a look at the state of the African Blogosphere as reported by Afrigator.

Disclaimer: This is not authoritative. It simply highlights the data that we have available on Afrigator and is not meant to be conclusive in any way.

 

Posted on December 3, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

2 million visitors to blogs

I completely missed this as a result of the Afrigator Beta launch but we’ve just passed the 2 million mark in sending traffic to blog sites from Afrigator. You can read more on the official Afrigator blog site.