How do they make money - Tim Bray

Tim Bray is

Technology Director at Sun Microsystems, which I joined on March 15, 2004. By way of disclosure, I should also say that I am a significant shareholder in Antarctica Systems, which I founded in 1999.

However, what I say here is certainly not guaranteed to be any company's official position on anything.

Seems like my kind of guy, when he comments on tech things

we still fail, most times, to produce things that are fun to use. Every time I start out with a new software tool ... I know in advance that there are going to be some moments of extreme pain when I want to do something obvious, basic, and necessary and I can't figure out how to do it. Then once you know how to do it, you understand why that is the natural and correct way.

He tries AdSense, and after a month reports

Summary: I’m not going to get rich or buy a new car with Google Ads, but turning ongoing from an expensive hobby to a sideline revenue source feels good.

John Battelle’s Business 2.0 write-up on the Foo Camp... increased my typical daily readership by a factor of five or so. Since basically all of them were first-time visitors, the click-through rate went way up; I estimate that this link was worth well over $200 in revenue. It’ll be interesting if I ever get Slashdotted again, since that multiples the feed by a factor of ten or twenty not five.

He is onto the point about writing pages for targeted ads.

Bloggers like Searls and Scoble, who write great stuff but jam all of it into the front page, are really not giving Google a chance to be smart about dealing out ads, and while they’re both quite a bit more popular than I am, I bet I make more ad money than they could as long as I’m running focused standalone essays and they’re running inline pieces.

And posts about his stats and income in June 2004

Over at "ongoing" I do about 5,000 impressions a day (my own web bug confirms the numbers AdSense reports) and I make $2-300/month over hosting expenses, a bit more if I get a pointer from CNN or elsewhere in the mainstream press. Not a significant income, but there's lots of growth potential I suspect.

Having said that, I suspect that eventually AdSense will get some competition and there will be more money to be made.

So that sums it up, targeted AdSense adverts, 5000 impressions a day, and an income monthly from AdSense in the region of around $400 to $500. Don't think he needs the money, as the day job pays well, but every little bit helps!