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Talk about unintended consequences, all I wanted to do with “A Review of My First Year of Blogging” was provide some factoids about my blog. However, this tidbit became quite the topic:

Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, but I’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float…)

Things started to heat up because of Chris Anderson’s entry called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job.” Various reactions followed:

  1. AdSense sucks for bloggers.

  2. Nobody can make money blogging.

  3. Guy’s clueless about AdSense and advertising.

  4. What link bait! Guy is so sly… (I wish I was this clever.)

So here’s more info about my advertising revenue and this whole drama:

  1. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” This was one factoid in a list of ten. It wasn’t the focus of the posting. Certainly my intent was not to get sympathy, position myself as clueless, impugn AdSense, or find advertisers—all of which happened! Several kind people even offered me great advice about how to increase revenue—the blogosphere never ceases to amaze me.

  2. The $3,350 is for all the revenue I got for the year (actually, the total is now about $4,000 because I found some checks) from all sources: AdSense, BlogAds, Federated Media, and Feedburner. I used AdSense for only a couple of months when I just started.

  3. I don’t take advertising revenue very seriously. It’s one way to keep score in blogging (Technorati is another), and I’m all for making as much as I can (to pay for my hockey), but it’s not the reason I blog.

  4. In case you’re interested, the reasons that I blog are:

    • To increase the likelihood that “two guys/gals in garage” with “the next Google” will come to Garage for funding.

    • To help companies and people that I (a) like, (b) have sometimes invested in, (c) am sometimes advising publicize their products and services. This is also known as “alignment of interest” as opposed to “conflict of interest.”

    • To be able to tell Web 2.0 entrepreneurs how full of shiitake they are if they think that advertising is a slam-dunk business model. Essentially, a Web 2.0 company would have to be 10,000 times better at selling advertising than me before it gets interesting.

    • To test ideas with “reality checks.” How many guys have 30,000-person focus groups?

    • To tap the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, ideas for my next book. How many guys have 30,000 people providing new-product ideas?

    • To make meaning and fulfill my mantra of “empowering people.”