Where Has All the Ad Money for Blogging Gone?
Advertising budgets have been shrinking since last Fall, and all forms of media have taken a hit. Print media and television advertising have certainly been effected, but it seems that online advertising has taken the hardest hit. I spoke to several liberal bloggers to see how they’ve been faring in the current economic climate.
Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend explains that “our advertising revenue is down about 50-60%. The first quarter of the year was surprisingly good, then the revenue caved.” Spaulding attributes the decline to the economy. “All forms of advertising are declining, and since the web is relatively new territory for many blog advertisers, they are pulling back to traditional media in some cases or dropping that significantly as well.”
Bil Browning says that The Bilerico Project has seen a similar trend. “Bilerico Project and all of our web properties have seen a dramatic decrease in the number of web advertisers since the economy tanked. Our advertising revenue has dropped to about 1/4th of what it was in 2008 while our traffic has doubled. Companies are holding back advertising budgets as they try to salvage employee paychecks and not-for-profits ability to buy ads has almost become non-existent as their donations have dried up.”
It’s not all bad news, though. Miriam Perez of Feministing says, “we had a boost in ad revenue (as most sites did) during the fall election season, so that really skewed our numbers for the year. Our ad revenue has not been entirely consistent over these last months, but has not dropped too significantly. That may also be because our traffic continues to increase. But to be honest, our ad revenue is just a supplement and does not do much more than cover costs and pay us each a small stipend.”
David Hauslaib of Queerty seems to be the most upbeat. “We’re on track for about the same advertising dollars. What we’ve seen are some clients spending less, while we’re able to attract clients from different areas, or those we haven’t worked with before. It certainly helps that we’re able to offer more customization and integrations than many other titles in our space.”
All of the bloggers I spoke to agreed that diversification of revenue streams is the key to riding out the economic decline. And as for the mainstream media’s recommendation a few weeks ago that blogging could become a form of passive income, people shouldn’t look to blogging if they want a consistent source of side income.
Photo credit: stock.xchng
Hi Serena, I speak from the other side of the stree. You see, some companies are looking for free forms of advertising, specifically web advertising like setting up a specific blog for a specific product or service, proposing free link exchanges with topic-related sites, even using social tools like Facebook or MySpace to “spread the word”.
Sometimes this kind of marketing campaigns turn out to be quite effective to attract traffic to a website, and using the available information technologies these usually cost $0 or almost zero.
As you may notice, with a financial crisis in the daily headlines, companies, especially small companies, will seek to reduce some costs to continue in business, and sometimes reducing advertising costs is better than staff downsizing.
Cheers!
* street