I was recently talking to a friend of mine about how you can make money online. He does a podcast, and was looking for sponsorship. I was telling him that even if he could get a CPM rate of $10 for every thousand plays that the show gets, with the thousand plays per weekly episode, and selling three ad spots, he’d only be looking at $120 per month.
After realizing that getting one thousand listeners per episode wasn’t easy for him, nor any podcaster, I immediately wondered how well podcast advertising scales. Surely it deals with the same sliding CPM rates that blogs and other forms of advertising get, and so the higher the traffic, the less money for every thousand listens he’ll get.
So estimating a maximum audience of ten thousand plays per episode, four episodes a month, and three sponsors per episode still paying $10 CPM, he would only be making $1200 per month for what, in my mind, would be an outrageously popular show.
Seems like there aren’t really any super easy ways to make money online and that it always comes back to creating a large enough audience that you can sell something, be it services, products, or advertisements, but the audience required to make a full time living off the web, is probably only achievable by two percent of those willing to chase it.
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Tom Walsh
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Wow 2 percent, is that a true statistic? Having just started out blogging thats not great news but if I could make $1200 dollars from my blog in a month I would be happy with that. I guess it just takes time and commitment.
David Peralty
August 23rd, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Tom - No, it isn’t a true statistic, more just an estimation based on my last three years in business.
As for making $1200/m from blogging, that would be great, but if you were working full time (or more than full time) hours to earn $1200/m, and didn’t really have the time or energy to focus on anything else, would that be enough to live off of?
Everyone thinks that making money online is passive, but it’s not. I’ve been working over ten hour days for three years. Everything is about perception though…
Bruno Auger
August 24th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I guess the only true way to make money online is to be focused and persistant. There is no fast way to get attain your goals online by taking a short cut thats for sure