You know that the blog hype is reaching some sort of boiling point when media predict million dollar incomes for the top bloggers in Sweden. An estimate by the media agency Wisely today at ekonominyheterna.se, says that the top 20 Swedish bloggers have a potential combined annual advertising income of 100 million kronor (14.5 milllion USD). Unfortunately that’s just not possible. Let’s make a comparison.
TechCrunch, one of the world’s top blogs, a year ago had more than 100,000 subscribers and today its FeedBurner icon says the site has in excess of 600,000 subscribers. In May, TechCrunch averaged about 2.5 million visits a month, a figure that is probably much higher today. Still, TechCrunch “only” generates about $200,000 a month from advertising, job listings, and sponsorships (about 16.5 million kronor a year).
The 20 Swedish top blogs in this article have a total of 880,000 weekly visitors (according to Bloggportalen.se). Wisely suggests that Alex Schulman’s blog could generate as much as 28.7 million kronor and his brother’s blog Schulmania, which was only active for 30 days (!) would attract revenues of 16.5 million kronor (his last post was made more than a week ago).
Blogs like my own have so far only gotten bread crumbs from advertising and even though a few fashion blogs have become quite successful, these figures are extremely unlikely. And furthermore, as an example, Alex Schulman’s blog is a personal blog and quite controversial (in Bloglines he only has 75 subscribers, even I have more). TechCrunch is a network of niche blogs with a high degree of involvement by its readers. To suggest that Schulman would attract more advertising income than TechCrunch just doesn’t make sense.
Of course blogs increasingly attract advertisers but we should try to make a reality check now and then.
Footnote: In this week’s Dagens Media (not online), an article says that the number of visitors to Swedish blogs is “brutally exaggerated”.
Tags: sweden, advertising, reklam, bloggar, annonser. Ping.
