More news on the business of blogging
We’ve taken a look at the economics of the business of blogging before but only from the bloggers perspective. Up until now we have been unable to shed some light on the economics of operating the blogging platform.
MobCon theory suggests there should be more money in operating the platform than creating the content but is there?
In the post Automattic Hits 300 Million Unique Visitors, Roughly $10 Million In Revenue TechCrunch reveals the numbers behind WordPress.com.
- How long has the platform been in operation? 5 Years
- Initial Investment? $1.1 Million in 2005
- Total Investment in the platform so far? $30.6 Million
- Traffic? 300 Million Uniques per month or about half the size of Facebook.
- Revenue? Just under $1 Million per Month
- Monthly ARPU? $0.003
- Where does most of the revenue come from? Premium services and the hosting service
- Number of Bloggers? about 30 million (That’s about 10% of all websites in the world)
- Web Ranking on Compete? 25
- Web Ranking on Quantcast? Top 10
Needless to say theses figure confirm what new media commentators have been saying for some time. Social media in all its forms (e.g. Blogging and Social Networking) is an ugly business that is big on traffic and small on ARPUs. Some of you may recall the restructuring of the Freemium Social Network Platform provider Ning into a Premium offering earlier this year.
Indeed the figures published by TechCrunch for WordPress.com are so surprisingly small that I’m going to have to revise the tables that I created for the post on how to monetize social media. However it continues to highlight the fact that – apart from the exception to the rule that is Google – there continues to be no correlation on the web between large volumes of “Freemium” traffic and strong ARPU’s.
