Marketing Ninja

I suspect that this morning’s Wall Street Journal piece by Mark Penn, America’s Newest Profession: Blogging, is going to go viral in the blogosphere, but not for the reasons that he intended. Rather, it’s going to go viral due to the disputes over this section of his article (emphasis mine):

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around — but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial. At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.

If you explore the links from Mr. Penn’s post (which I have preserved in my quote) you’ll find his data sources for his 100,000 visitors per month = $75,000 U.S. claim. I’m skeptical. Even if you did have 100,000 visitors per month (1.2 m per year), I still think $75,000 would be a tough sell. Volume of traffic is in itself valueless – the revenue-generating actions taken by that traffic makes a world of difference.

At Mr. Penn’s rate, a single unique visitor produces roughly $0.01 worth of revenue over the course of a year. A unique visitor can mean anything – it could be someone who stumbles across an ancient article sitting deep in a blog’s archives via a Google search or it could be a subscriber who checks the blog multiple times per day. Mr. Penn doesn’t qualify it beyond the simple “unique visitor” unit of measure.

At that rate, my blog is projected to earn roughly $450 this year from 72,000 unique visitors. When I had higher traffic figures  from August 2007 to August 2008 (over 100,000 visitors in that period) I made approximately $100 off of AdSense and Amazon Affiliate marketing combined during that period. Where’s the rest of my Internet money?

I lock horns with a lot of Internet marketers over the value of web-traffic. My philosophy is that not all web traffic is created equal, and a “visit” or a “pageview” ultimately has a dollar-value of $0.00 unless you can prove otherwise with accurately attributed data.

Articles like these illustrate my point beautifully – web traffic is of little-to-no value itself. It’s what your visitors actually do that makes them valuable. 100,000 unique visitors a month means nothing if those visitors don’t do anything of interest of or value to advertisers, sponsors, or affiliates.

This is why most CPM-based advertising models have vanished from the wild – impressions are mostly meaningless and don’t provide enough returns to advertisers to be sustainable. CPC/CPA advertising is meaningful because visitors actually have to do something of value before money changes hands.

As for the payola model of blog monetization. Well, that’s a wholy different (and scary) story.

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