Anyway, I do have my name domain, and am trying to figure out what to do with it exactly just yet. So much other work stuff going on now and I’m really very busy with it all (hence why this blog hasn’t been updated in forever), but I do like your ideas, and thank you.

If you’re ever interested (and have time) to write up a post taking your explanations further in depth, I’ll be happy to post it and give you a link back (haha) with full credit!

Thanks again for stopping by and please keep in touch!

I agree that if your sole purpose is to make money online with the types of ways I’m assuming you are (AdSense, affiliate links, etc), then you’re right – free hosted blogs can be a tool to do that in the way you mentioned. Absolutely.

What I had in mind here though in terms of making money was regarding direct ad sales for the most part. (I should’ve clarified that, yes.)

If you look at the current ad rates for a highly popular blog like dooce.com, for example:

The minimum cost for a 125×125 sidebar ad (the smallest banner available) from October 6, 2009 to November 6, 2009 is $4049.50. That’s for ONE ad. Now, keep in mind, the site today doesn’t seem to be running these, but one’s left to assume that it’s because people are choosing different ads. But usually, people show a minimum of two of these in their sidebar.

Okay, so since there aren’t any of those showing, let’s go to the ones that are.

She’s got a 300×250 at the top of her sidebar. The cost for this spot is $6006 per month for the minimum amount of rotations. This works out to $18.20 CPM.

I’ll freely admit, I gave up on AdSense a long time ago after making pennies on it, but I’m pretty damn sure that $18.20 CPM is reallllly good for the publisher, correct?

Dooce runs her ads through Federated Media. They’re pretty exclusive, to say the least, and I know they don’t work with free blogs (and you have to have some really large amount of traffic). So when I say that ad revenue sucks for free hosted blogs? THIS is what I’m talking about.

Now, I know that’s an extreme. Dooce is highly popular, butt-tons of traffic, book deals, talk show visits, etc. But honestly, the basic rate for “everyday” type blogs is $2-$4 CPM. Considering that AdSense is CPC, and affiliate links are CPA – my choice would be to drive traffic to your site in order to get the pageviews so you can 1) Make money CPM style, and 2) Eventually charge more CPM.

It’s not a defunct business model for blogs – it’s one that’s widely used and widely accepted by advertisers in private ad sales.

And thank you for bringing up the sale-able part of it too. Look at BankRate’s purchase of Bankaholic for $15M after it’d only been online 2 years! Now that is some smart thinking, smart SEO, and amazing work all around. John Wu deserves every penny for his genius.

That all being said – SY, thank you for your respectful disagreement. I don’t argue with what you said, I just happened to not make myself entirely clear with the post when I wrote it. (And I didn’t highlight the other terms I had looked at – I picked one that relates to a blog niche that I happen to own a blog in.)

I’m thinking of starting up a few case studies so I can use that material for posts in the future. Thanks again for stopping by and participating in the discussion!

Many blogs hosted by blogger or wp that are ignored by search engines might be because the user puts very little work into them. Often there are only a few short posts spread around several months. The topics you mentioned have great competition in the SE’s

Then you have the people who paid someone to build them a static site and tacked the blog link on because they wanted to get in on blogging for the $.

— it is not just a matter of the tool itself being the reason they aren’t succeeding — a blog is work whether on blogger or self hosted. If someone’s main reason for keeping a blog is for the monetization and not because they really want to write they will probably fail.