As regular readers would be aware, i blog for two reasons,

1. that i love blogging and have for the most part blogged many times a day since i first started
2. that i make an increasingly large amount of money from blogging.

This post is about the second point, money and that i’m making it.

When i first started blogging there was this so called “professional blogging” where it sounded easy to make money that anyone can do it. Just slap a few adsense banners on your blog and away you go making money. What the fine print doesn’t say is that its liekly to take a long time on anything but i high traffic blog to make any kind of real money. Adsense has a minimum payout of $100 and having been displaying adsense banners since March 2005, i’m still based on current income at least half a year away from being paid out for the first time, probably longer. Thanks to changing the positioning of my ads, in the last couple of months i have increased my income from the ads several hundred percent but several hundred percent of not much is still not a lot. So saying I’ve passed last months revenue for this month already.

So thats adsense so what about other sources of income. Using PayPerPost (PPP) i have had the chance to make money and to give you an idea of the money involved, my adsense has been battling along for 18 months, so far in September alone i have made 4 times the money made IN TOTAL from the adsense revenue over 18 months. The way its going, thats likely to come close to doubling again by the end of September. Beats adsense by a long way when i can make 8 times 18 months of income in a single month.

So whats it mean for adsense on this blog and for bloggers as a whole? I’m thinking that both methods of advertising revenue on a typical blog can work but that the relatively slow trickle of income from adsense as opposed to PPP is going to make adsense less attractive and to retain their footing in the door of lower traffic blogs, adsense is likely to have to increase payout figures considerably. Lowering the minimum payout is also a possibility to make the income more assessable in a reasonable period to the average personal blogger. I personally am using it less and moving to other revenue streams and its possible in the longer term i may drop it (after i get my $100 naturally!) Overall for the average blogger though PPP has to be more attractive!