Over a month and a half ago I looked through the Top 100 Make Money Online blog list (see the previous post entitled: Five Months Later: Top 50 Make Money Online Blogs Shuffle), and compared it to five months previous, and to my surprise, very little had changed. Many blogs shuffled around, but for the most part, there weren’t many new blogs in the Top 50, and there weren’t many double digit shifts in position.
This time though, there are factors at play that have totally changed the playing field and confirming to me that there are a few types of blogs in any niche.
The first group are the ones that are thought leaders. They stand at the top of the pack, and consistently rank in the top ten for their niche.
Then there are the echo chamber folks that sit near the end, and probably won’t get into this top 50 list any time soon.
Lastly, there is pretty much everyone else, and there is a strange pattern appearing to me with regards to this middle section. Some of the blogs rise to the top, joining the though leaders, others fall to the bottom, and almost none stick to where they are now.
It seems to me like many blogs rise quickly, make a good impression, get a wide following and enjoy a period of success before slowly dropping back down, and being replaced by someone new.
My guess is that most of these blogs have realized the sad truth about blogging in this niche: it is hard to make money blogging about making money online.
More NEW Sites
To me it looks like there are more new sites in this list than ever before, and what is really interesting to me, someone that follows this niche closely, is how few of these sites I have any experience with. Did they quickly rise up the list, just recently added to the list, or were they hidden gems that I didn’t notice?
Lots of Double Digit Movement
On this list, there is a huge number of blogs that rose or fell by ten places or more, and this is in a large part to the two important shifts over the last six weeks.
The first shift is how Alexa ranks blogs, and because of this, many blogs that were doing really well, are now falling fast, while others that weren’t doing so well in the Alexa ranking department are floating fast to the top. Alexa hasn’t released the information on how their new calculations are being made, but it definitely appears to be a game changer for some blogs.
The other recent news was a small Google PageRank update that helped some previously PR 0 blogs get ranked higher on the list. In the top 50, there are only two blogs with a PageRank of three, everyone else is higher. Some sites got a small decrease, while others that were previously penalized for selling text links, got a slight reprieve.
Conclusion
The previous list was nice, and well rounded. It was missing a few people that I thought were great in the niche, and while some of them have returned to the Top 50, I feel like this currently list is really strange and not as well representative of the niche as the previous one was.
What does this mean for the Make Money Online niche? I am not certain yet. I think in a few months we will have a better picture for what is going on, but it does seem like many once popular sites are losing their will to really compete, allowing new sites to get into the top 50 ranking for the niche. I look forward to hearing what Mark, the Top 100 list’s provider’s opinion on the new Top 50 Make Money Online blogs.
Originally posted on May 12, 2008 @ 5:21 pm