Now Reading
Dave Winer has yet to hang his pajamas

Dave Winer has yet to hang his pajamas

Dave Winer wrote a rebuttal to Daniel Lyons’ piece on the latter’s hanging of the blogging pajamas. “There’s no money in blogs.” says Lyons. Winer on the other hand says there is — he just made 2 million:

So when I told you I made over $2 million with this blog, why did you immediately look for ads? I can save you the trouble — there aren’t any. And in the 12 years this blog has been here there has never been an ad on this blog. With a caveat, unless you count me talking about my products. Because I do talk about my products here. I try to stay as balanced as I can, but of course I tilt toward the positive. I have a bias — I wouldn’t have made the products if I didn’t think they were good. But like all people with real products I know they’re not perfect, sometimes they’re imperfect, and I try to be honest about that. [quote]


I’ve sized up Dave Winer mostly from his guestings in Leo Laporte’s TWiT and he comes off as a no nonsense kind of guy (he IS “Mr. RSS” after all). And he does raise an important facet in new media – that making money online from blogs isn’t all just about slapping an ad code or optimizing posts for search. Sure we can earn from that, but the mentality of ads, ads, ads is quite fashionably getting … old.

This isn’t 2004 anymore. There’s still a lot of media buying going on, but since everyone else is creating their own version of Engadget or Lifehacker, the pool for ad buys just gets more and more saturated – if not more discerning. If it’s one thing we might learn from the recession, it’s that ads will only go so far as a completely sustainable model.

See Also
Google Search Data

There’s a difference between making money from blogs and making money because of your blog. Are you doing both?

View Comment (1)
  • If you want to make money from online advertising, a blog is not a good way to do it. It’s all front list: nearly all your page views are on the most recent posts.

    Also blogs are just too damned efficient at providing the content. We look at ads when the other stuff on the page isn’t quite what we want. With a blog, the only part most of us look at are the posts… we don’t even see the ads.

    Something like AllTop, where you have to work hard to scan for content, will make much more from advertising than a blog.

    If you want to make money online advertising them build a platform or a database. Or a combination of the two.

    Thus speaketh the voice of complete inexperience. I make money from blogging only is so much as it helps me achieve other business goals, I suppose David Winer is in the same position (but with rather more money).

Scroll To Top