How do they make money - John Battelle

John Battelle's Searchblog carries AdSense and Adbrite ads (humm, not sure if he is meant to do that)

Quite some CV, according to the UC Berkley School of Jouralism

Visiting Professor John Battelle is one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and the founder and former Chair of Standard Media International ("The Standard"), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. He has been responsible for or involved in the launch of more than 30 magazines and websites, including more than a dozen in international markets. He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as well as a finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year.

An interview with Google Blog reveals

I started it as a way to catalyze a conversation between myself and what I hoped would be a small but robust community of folks in the search industry, mainly to help me research and ponder the book i am writing. I was stunned when I realized that it got to more than 50K readers

That was the sum total of the information available on the search engines. I assume Mr Battelle is owning up to 50,000 visits per day (it is unlikely to be 50,000 per month - even a less high profile blog can manage around 1500 a day)

No indication anywhere as to what he is earning from Adbrite and AdSense, though he is not too impressed with Adbrite

As for the AdBrite system, I agree that the ads which show up on my site are mostly crap.

Given his (considerable) income from non blogging sources, he is certainly doing well with blog traffic. If he were to achieve even a modest CPM on AdSense of $2, then he would be getting $100 a day, or say $35,000 a year at a best guess. Not bad for a hobby site.