You’ve Got Links, But Are You Making Money?
How Your Technorati Authority Relates To Your Income
There have recently been a lot of posts relating to how much money bloggers make. I decided to take one of those posts, Paula’s List of Bloggers Salaries, and see if income had any correlation to Technorati Authority. I used Paula’s list as my base and weeded out any I didn’t think qualified as Blogs, as well as any that didn’t have technorati Authority and plotted up the result.
I fit the data with a second order polynomial curve. My reasoning here was that income would not be linear, i.e. as the site grew bigger and bigger additional authority would have less and less impact on its income. Although the curve fit isn’t as good as I had hoped, ( R squared = .747 isn’t great), it still has a fairly distinct trend, especially once you get above the 1000 authority range.
The most striking thing about this chart is how little affect your authority seems to have on income for sites with Authority less than 1000. It appears that for smaller sites, especially those first starting out, there is not a strong correlation between the number of other blogs linking to them and how much money they are making. Several of the sites (Paula Neal Mooney, Authority 1031 Income $12000) have fairly strong authority but little income. A couple (GPS review, Authority 80, Income $50000) have very weak authority but relatively strong income.
I offer two explanations for some of the discrepancy between income and authority for lower ranking sites. The first is that sites such as Paula Neal have seen a recent jump in their authority, but the income hasn’t caught up. Paula Neal is the source of this blogging income, and I know that it acting as heavy link bait. I can only assume that posting the blogging salaries list has greatly driven up her backlinks, but that income has a lag time as she figures out how to best Monetize the new traffic.
Additionally some sites (such as GPS review) may be in a much better niche than others. It appears that GPS review, which I assume reviews GPS products, is in a very good niche. They have managed to monetize their site well without relying heavily on blogger backlinks. This is also partially due to the fact that their site is only part blog. Additionally income is generated by their forums and shopping pages.
Kudos go to Steve Pavlina - who is managing to make bank despite only a medium high authority. His site says that he is making $1000/day (up significantly from a year ago). So if you are looking for someone to model your site off of, you may want to check him out and learn his secrets. So Steve, got an e-book?
Here is the Data I used to make the chart. As there was no good income for Problogger or Shoemoney, those are both Guesstimates. Several webpages on Paula’s chart (Woot for instance) were left off because she just considered Adsense income and not the income for the entire site, throwing off my chart. Finally, a couple of the incomes (Connected Internet) were tweaked to be a better fit when I saw that the Paula had used April’s earnings which had taken a huge dip from March earnings. In that case I gave connected Internet a salary of March earnings * 12.
|
Website |
Technorati Authority |
Google |
Annual Income |
| ProBlogger | 7209 |
6 |
300000 |
| ShoeMoney | 4472 |
6 |
200000 |
| John Chow | 4058 |
6 |
140431 |
| Steve Pavlina | 2967 |
6 |
365000 |
| Connected Internet | 2159 |
6 |
106961 |
| Coolest Gadgets | 1235 |
6 |
153931 |
| Paula Neal Mooney | 1031 |
5 |
12000 |
| Entrepreneurs-Journey | 791 |
6 |
78594 |
| Net Business Blog | 666 |
5 |
12000 |
| Earn Money Blogging | 402 |
3 |
4995 |
| PodcastDirectory | 349 |
7 |
40000 |
| Tyler Cruz | 343 |
5 |
23000 |
| Business Logs | 336 |
6 |
9000 |
| Career Ramblings | 332 |
6 |
42340 |
| All Tips And Tricks | 301 |
4 |
2316 |
| Mubin Ahnmed | 284 |
2 |
32196 |
| Courtney Tuttle | 264 |
3 |
3516 |
| Lazy Man And Money | 254 |
5 |
4707 |
| King Nomar | 236 |
5 |
2229 |
| Genius Types | 220 |
6 |
1163 |
| BBW Exchange | 109 |
6 |
36000 |
| Derek Semmler | 82 |
4 |
1102 |
| GPS Review | 81 |
5 |
50000 |
| Blog Talks | 47 |
6 |
36735 |
| Crazy Hamster | 46 |
3 |
1385 |
| The Anands Ripples | 35 |
1 |
851 |
| Working Nomad | 33 |
4 |
8928 |
| Left Blank | 32 |
4 |
6610 |
| Adam Dempseys Blog | 24 |
4 |
13672 |
| Ontora | 19 |
4 |
1728 |
I would like to continue this study, and maybe do an updated earnings/authority in a while. In order to do so I need more data! So what kind of money does your blog make? Drop it in a comment and I’ll be sure to include it in the next batch.
on May 26th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Are you sure you really want to do this by authority? How about by Rank, that makes more sense. I was confused for awhile because I thought you were talking about rank…
on May 26th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
You have gone deeper with this correlation analysis. I keep wondering if we could get, monthly unique visitor and pageview data from these champions and also be able to correlate them to their blog incomes.
This could give us the productivity index. I would not be surprised to see some few blogs with astonishing page views and visitor traffic, but abysmal income of $500 monthly blog incomes.
Keep up the good work.
on May 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Hi Mubin,
I also looked at the blog PR while I was doing the analysis, indeed that is in the data chart at the bottom, but found it doesn’t discriminate quite enough for my intent
The problem with PR is that it seems as though many blogs get clumped at 6. In fact only one blog on my list had a PR above 7, and that wasn’t even a super earner.
You can see a chart of that on my published Google Docs
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pBH5xaMIpNb38OePqk6XzNg
I suppose that I could use one of the PR estimation tools to try to get a fractional Page Ranking which might be worthwhile.
Anyways, thanks for stopping by.
on May 26th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Philomena,
I would welcome such an analysis and actually considered doing it here. The problem of course is that the traffic and page view stats aren’t as frequently published as earnings, and might require e-mailing various bloggers to get.
However if anyone wants to leave me some numbers, or a link where they posted it on their blog, I can be sure to include it in a future post.
Alternatively of course we could use Alexa traffic rankings, which might make for an interesting analysis. Perhaps next weekend I can do that, unless another blogger jumps the gun.
on May 26th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I’d be willing to share my traffic info with anyone thats interested. The only problem is with awstats and moving servers. When you move a server you lose all your old data. I guess analytic stats would be a good indicator if anything.
:). And when I meant rank I was talking about technorati rank, not Page Rank.
Page Rank is good for nothing EXCEPT selling links.
Yes, I definitely agree that moving past the Page Rank 6 range is very very difficult.
on May 26th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
Absolutely amazing detail on that graph.
And you’re right, I believe my income is really catching up with my pageviews, which, by the by, are on target to hit 100,000 pageviews with 54,000 uniques for the month of May 2007. (Thank the Lord for that viral post!)
And you’re also right about places like GPSReview finding a good product blog niche.
I’m totally getting into that, too, setting up niche sites while keeping my regular blog.
I’m really geeked about it all now that I finally found Blogtrepreneur’s simple instructions on how to set up a dot com.
Thanks for the link love.
Great piece,
Paula
on May 26th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Paula,
Thanks for stopping by. Glad to hear that your revenue is starting to catch up with your traffic. It’s interesting to hear stories sometimes of how some people slog away and get a near linear increase in traffic over time, where others do something and get a lot of attention, catch a break and shoot in traffic.
Clearly the second category is more fun
Mubin,
You’re right. Technorati rankings have a better correlation. In fact they could have a linear aspect to them as a site will be able to quickly shoot up in the rankings with a few incoming links when it is new, but established sites need much more to move from say, 200th to 150th. Between that and Alexa rankings I think that I have found fodder for another post, probably next Saturday
on May 27th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
There’s a CRAP load of omitted variable bias here.. you have to account for a bunch of other factors correlated with authority and income..
this regression is useless. and yes, a linear regression would be better. and no, a higher R^2 doesn’t necessarily mean the regression is better.
on May 27th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Miguel
Thanks for your comments. Clearly you aren’t going to be able to draw up an equation saying Income = some function of Authority, at least not with the data I used.
I’ll freely admit that there is bias in here six ways from Sunday. Did the bloggers report their income accurately, did Paula have selection bias when she picked which blogs to list, did I have selection bias when I decided which of Paula’s could really count as blogs and which couldn’t?
Luckily though I’m not submitting this analysis to any peer reviewed journal. Much more of a “Take a look at this chart” kind of thing
But if you have some specific suggestions you think might make this more useful, I’m happy to hear them.
Thanks!
Scott