February 13, 2004

Blogs Buying Blog Ads: Why?

Instapundit is one of the blogs you just have to study if you are going to have any hope of turning serious money as a blogger. He's got the links. He's got the circulation. Analyzing the Instaman's methods is all to the good for the aspiring blogger/capitalist. But one thing on that site puzzles me. There's an ad there for another blog, the Chicago Report. Now this is a pretty good blog in itself but its got nowhere near the traffic levels necessary to bring in the kind of income that would justify spending hundreds on advertising on Instapundit. It would be like advertising your local pizza joint on CNN.com. Sure, you'd get some traffic, but would that make back the money you laid out on the ad?

Instapundit's blogads price sheet is one link away from the front page and is as follows:
1 week - $375
2 weeks - $600
1 month - $1000
3 months - $5000
1 year - $20000

The Chicago Report ad has been up at least a week so they're putting out hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to get...

twice as much traffic as I get for free.

As of this writing, I've got 3500 visits this month and they've got 7000. You can't get much money for that sort of traffic and Chicago Report's Blog Ads price sheet shows it:

1 week - $20
2 weeks - $30
1 month - $80
3 months - $200
1 year - $1000

Amazingly, Chicago Report does currently have two ads running, both decent blogs that are either getting comp'd or are advertising as a vanity project.

I don't understand the idea of spending hundreds of dollars to get back tens. Chicago Report has good production values, good writing (though I do disagree with some of it, just look at their comments) but I can't make sense of their business plan.

So what am I missing?

Posted by TMLutas at February 13, 2004 01:50 PM