How I made over $2 million with this blog

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 by Dave Winer.

On Twitter early this morning I said something provocative. "I've made over $2 million from my blog and Dan thinks blogs can't make money. He needs to get out of the box more often."  

I was referring to Dan Lyons, who had written a piece in Newsweek that said among other things: "While blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn't one of them." 

I agree. Blogs don't make money. But people with blogs can.  

Dan, this is not a fairy tale, I got the check and it had seven figures. But this isn't one of those pitches to get you to buy a book or a video or to come hear me give a lecture. I've made a lot of money with this blog, and may make a bunch more, but I'm not going to show you how to do it. But I will try to get you to change the way you think about blogs and other social media. 

Let me start by asking a question.  

Assume you run a business and you advertise. How much money did you make from your advertisements? 

Presumably your ads make money, otherwise why are you running them? 

Now in figuring out how much money you made from the ads, did you look for ads on your ads? That makes no sense of course. Why would anyone try to make money by putting an ad on an ad? 

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.  

Now -- how did I make more than $2 million with this blog? 

Well, I ran a commercial company for quite a few years, UserLand Software, and I used this blog to talk about what the company was doing. We had reasonable sales -- probably over $1 million while I had the blog. We never took out an ad, or hired a PR firm. All the promotion ever done for the company was done right here. So let's count half of that $1 million toward the total.  

Then there are the consulting gigs I've gotten over the years I've been running the blog. None of them directly resulted from pitches I made here, I never said "Hire me to tell you how to build your product, or work with your community, or serve your users," but the posts I've written here have served as a calling card, a way of keeping my name and ideas on people's minds. Over the years, that's a few hundred thousand. 

But the real whopper was the deal where I sold weblogs.com to Verisign for $2.3 million. Again, a product that never had an ad, never had a PR campaign, the only way anyone heard of it was through this blog.  

So we're already over $3 million -- and all I did was what any blogger does -- talk about what I'm doing. And that's the role of a blog, it's a way of communicating what you're doing. Companies, consultants and authors need to do a lot of communicating, and blogs allow you to go direct, and be more efficient, less diluted. People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you're like as a person.  

Why would I ever let someone else hitch their "message" on this -- it would get in the way of me making money!  

If I had any advice to offer it's this -- get in the habit of communicating directly with the people you want to influence. Don't charge them to read it and don't let others interfere with your communication. Talk through your blog as you would talk face to face. You'd never stop mid-sentence and say "But first a word from my sponsor!" -- so don't do that on your blog either. I can't promise you'll make any money from your blog, and I think the more you try the less chance you have. Make a good product and listen to your customers to make it better, and use the tools to communicate, and you may well make money from the whole thing. To expect the blog alone to pay your bills is to misunderstand what a blog can do. You'll only be disappointed like Dan Lyons was.