How Much Money do Bloggers Make?

How much money do bloggers make? At AdPlugg, we work with a lot of bloggers – helping them to achieve monetary success with their blogs. Earlier this year we wrote about How to Make Money Blogging. In this post, we stated:

Did you know that it’s not uncommon for advertisers to pay $300 per month for an inch tall ad on the side of a blog. Get ten of those and you are making $36,000 a year to blog.

But how much money do bloggers make as a whole? How much on average do bloggers make? In this post we are going to work to provide some answers. As of today, AdPlugg has features for serving and managing ads, but does not yet have billing features. Once we do, we plan to offer anonymous statistics regarding average revenue etc. But for now, we’ll just report on what we know from experience and what we were able to find through research.

In 2010 Technorati published a study reporting that 36% of bloggers reported some sort of income from their blogs, most often in the form of ad revenue from display ads. A similar study from Technorati, published in 2009 reported the mean annual income from advertisements at $42,548. Does this mean that you can start a blog and instantly make $42,548 per year? Not really. Here are the major contributing factors to how much money your blog can make:

• Subject – A blog about luxury cars may have a better earning potential than a blog about ant farms.
• Audience Size – How many readers you have is directly related to how much you can earn. Advertisers won’t pay much for ads that only get in front of a couple of readers.
• Influence – Becoming an influencer drives up the price of your ads. Advertisers will pay more to be on a blog that is a trusted source of information for their market.

Additional insight can be gleaned from the fact that $42.8 Billion was generated in online ad revenues last year (see U.S. Online Ad Revenues Hit $42.8B, Surpass Broadcast TV) and close to 20% of the web runs on WordPress.

Most bloggers start out blogging on the side and eventually switch to blogging as their full time profession. How much you can earn is up to your blog (see bullets above) but a well run blog can probably expect to bring in anywhere from $10k per year to upwards of $100k per year. If your blog becomes a runaway success (think mashable.com, gizmodo.com, huffingtonpost.com, etc) it can earn millions in ad revenues. Stay tuned for more as we work on surveys and reports to get the how much money do bloggers make? question answered more scientifically.