More Money For Bloggers in 2010?

Dec 292009

Web publishers are reaping huge profits as the 2.0 bubble heats up. Google has become better at weeding out spam, allowing higher quality sites to rise to the top and finally starting booking some serious revenue. As the popularity of adwords increases, so does the balance of blogger’s bank accounts enrolled in the adsense program.

Even sites focused on small towns and small communities are able to make a substantial amount of money because local service businesses are one of the most expensive online advertising niches, especially for high dollar items. I have recently seen prices as high as $50 CPM for specialized local service content oriented sites. .

A gigantic spike in click prices is likely to occur over the next 24 months. Google’s recent string of acquisitions plus the price for local service clicks exceeding eight dollars tells me Google anticipates Adwords Advertisers seeking cheaper advertising solutions on smaller networks and is working to combat it by buying them. Bring on the antitrust.

Payouts to blog and website publishers are likely to continue to increase as advertisers abandon social networks because of increased cost, lower quality and volume issues. The fact is, Facebook advertising prices have increased faster than the number of accounts on their network. Businesses that built successful advertising campaigns on MySpace, Facebook and Google are rediscovering comfortable margins on smaller, third party ad networks (Etology, Adbrite, Bidvertiser etc) as these networks continue to improve their targeting capabilities and provide much cheaper traffic and easier ad approvals.

The end result, higher cost per click = good for publishers. Adsense publishers on average receive approximately $0.50/click for their traffic, the highest amount in history. Specialized sites focusing on medical, dental, and insurance are seeing well above $1.50/click as advertisers are finally learning how to properly target sites in the adwords content network. Expect your banner spots to pay more than just your hosting bill in the near future.

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