How do they make money - Russell Beattie

Russell Beattie is not a full time blogger, and he is not trying to earn a full time income off blogging.

He has ended up working for Yahoo. Bit of networking involved, but we all do that don't we?

a few weeks ago I wrote about deciding not to go through the interview process at Google and suddenly my site got a megaton of attention. It was nuts. Among the variety of emails I got over the next week, Jeremy emailed me again to ask if I heard anything from Yahoo and when I said no, he used some of his newfound pull at Yahoo to have "someone" get in contact with me. You can imagine my surprise when a few days later I received an email from Jerry Yang himself.

And after 4 months working as a contractor for Yahoo, he gets a full time job there in Feb 2005

So on Monday morning I'm going to trade in my blue Contractor badge, and swap it for a spanky indigo Employee badge and become a full timer at Yahoo! This just happened during the last couple of days. I was coming to the end of my current contract, and Y! extended a great offer to join full time and after some thought I decided to take it. Though I'd love to start my own company or join a little startup already in progress, the opportunities at Yahoo are just too big to pass up. It's literally an opportunity to change the world, how can I say no?

He is sensitive of the problems that blogging can cause within corporations - remember Mark Jen and Google a few weeks ago.

That said, this blog will remain, as much as I can make it, an independent entity, but I'll obviously have to post more disclaimers from now on.

Anyway, having established that Rus is not a full time blogger, lets see how much he is raking in from his blogging on the side. He has built up his blog to getting in March 2005 around 5000 visitors per day according to his site stats counter. He has tried to monetarise that traffic with AdSense (there is an O'Reilly ad as well)

I made $819 in ads in December.

He has dabbled with AdSense alternatives, but that has not worked

Yep, Kanoodle didn't work out. Over two days I made $12 (where I would normally make almost $45 given my AdSense average for Wednesdays and Thursdays). And worse than that, today the Koodle ads just aren't showing up. Nothing, just a big blank box. No one's going to click on the ads if there's nothing there.

Interestingly not everyone gets the AdSense ads served. The ads only appear when you visit this site from a Google search or from a referrer, the "regular" visitors do not get the ads

I've changed it so *any* referrer will show the ads. Based on the links people click, it's obvious that many people are searching, finding other blogs first, and then clicking through to my blog. Since I can't see the trail, I just turned it on for everyone. Regular readers, however, still don't see it.

And he reaches the same conclusion that everyone has on niche sites for blogging as the way to make money

If you think about the business models of Engadget or MobileTracker or any of the new types of professional blogs out there, they're really nothing but honey traps like this. But they're still making the pretense of focusing on a specific topic area like gadgets or phones. Screw that! Whatever the big seller is (say Vioxx or whatever), well, you spend a couple of hours researching that topic, writing up a summary, maybe add a few links and bam! You've got a honey trap. Now you wait a few days for the Search Engines to start referring over traffic, much of which notices the largish ads you've place in the middle of your content and when they click, you get paid.

So there we have it, Russell gets 5000 visitors a day, and makes $27 a day ($800 a month) off the web site in adverts, the bulk off AdSense. And he yearns after getting more from niche marketing!