Having currently been reading The Cult of The Amateur (Andrew Keen) for around two weeks now, I had started to think that writing a blog is a thoroughly unprofitable and unrewarding business. Keen points out on numerous occassions that many of the big blogs we think about being profitable are in fact not at all. His examples are Guy Kawasaki’s, gofugyourself, etc. None of which pulled in much revenue. (Thank god I have a proper job I thought!)
However, new figures released today about TechCrunch suggest that Keen has got this massively wrong. The SF Chronicle has just released figures suggesting that TechCrunch generates around $240k a month in advertising revenue. That is a serious amount of money whatever business you are in and shows really the worth of TechCrunch to those within the digital industry and perhaps those sourcing information about it. At 1.25m visitors per month the site has significant traffic and works out at a cost per visitor of $192. If for example, every visitor visits the site say 3 times…then the average cost per impression (visitors x freq of visit) is $64. This seems like a pretty expensive way of advertising to an audience who could probably be considered to be advertising adverse.
Anyway, it seems to be working for TechCrunch..they have just hired a new CEO, so good luck to them.
Matt Bamford-Bowes
