We’ve been asked if we’ll publish full feeds on SEO Theory. And apparently a growing number of SEOs feel that “SEO blogs” are forcing visitors to push up page views (and look at advertising). Frankly, I don’t care about page views. And this blog doesn’t carry advertising. SEO Theory is a Web site, not a newsletter. It’s here on the Web for people to read, ignore, or laugh at. Take it or leave it.
Much though I appreciate how many people have grown accustomed to using feed readers, I’m in the business of creating Web content. This site was created for the purpose of discussing SEO theory (and, to some extent, to demonstrate how to apply SEO theory).
I do run advertising on my personal Web sites. It pays the server fee. But I see no reason why any professional site should carry advertising. It looks unprofessional. It leads me to conclude that you cannot earn enough money from the work you do to bear up the business expense of operating a Web account. You don’t need a dedicated server to run your SEO blog. I need a dedicated server to run my 50-gigabyte-per-month non-commercial network.
One day there will probably be no World Wide Web — just a huge network of information sources that we access from various personal data viewers. Universal Search will be a thing of the past. But that day hasn’t come yet and I’m not ready to give up producing Web content for Web browsers. Especially given the subject matter of this blog. It’s about search engine optimization theory, not feed reader optimization theory.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
tinkerbellchime 08.02.07 at 8:23 pm
“But I see no reason why any professional site should carry advertising. It looks unprofessional. It leads me to conclude that you cannot earn enough money from the work you do to bear up the business expense of operating a Web account.”
I agree…it’s crazy when businesses sell ads on their business websites. A regular website costs about $12-$59 per month, so if they can’t afford that small of a cost then ads aren’t going to help them. Any stats on how much most sites earn on selling Google ads? I’m going to see if I can find any reliable numbers. I don’t recall seeing any.
Michael Martinez 08.03.07 at 4:27 am
There are no official numbers of which I am aware but I have seen a few discussions where people disclosed earnings. If everyone in those discussions was being honest and if their results were typical, the average AdSense-bearing Web site earns less than $100 per month.
tinkerbellchime 08.03.07 at 4:35 pm
Thanks for the honest answer. A hundred dollars seems about right. There is too much bluster about what people make on their websites. It’s hard to get anyone to admit that they make very little. I appreciate the heads up on this issue. There has to be a better business model than AdSense, which is great for the goo-goo gods, but not the rest of us go-go page slaves.
Michael Martinez 08.03.07 at 6:17 pm
Spammers make their money on volume. If a spammer’s typical gross profit per site is about $5.00 a month, he only needs 1,000 Web sites to make a pretty decent living.
Most of the black hats I have evaluated operate anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 Web sites at a time. They don’t have to earn much money from any of those sites — just enough to pay for the domain names and the very low-cost hosting fees.
My personal (non-spam) network earns about enough to pay for dedicated hosting and 24/7 response customer service. My partner and I are satisfied with that.
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