Is the guy who makes $30k/mo. on his web site from ads for real?

Thaed

I hesitate to name the guy (Chow), but his angle is that he talks about how much he makes in ads from his site. He's obviously very good at promoting himself. My only question is whether he is really making the money he's claiming.

GreatTeacherMacRoss

And this website is...?

Usagimaru

And this website is...?

Wouldn't putting up the link just give him even more than the insane amount of money he's making off of ads?

jcc

Not sure where one would find a reliable source, but non-reliable internet sources suggest he was making around half that (I'd suspect gross, not net) in 2007. Mostly it seems through careful manipulation of page rankings on things like Google, Digg, and Technorati to end up on the first page for various searches and then selling linkbacks to people who wanted their sites boosted by his. Google caught wind of him and manually de-indexed him, last I heard. Not sure about the others. Don't know how it's affected things.

Thaed

And this website is...?

Honestly, I didn't want to give him any traffic. But the site is: http://www.johnchow.com/

HMTKSteve

I'm surprised people still spend money to advertise on his site. I've read some reports and most of the people I hear from were not overly impressed with the results.

Σπεκωσποκ

Short answer: No.
Long answer: Maybe, but not in the way you'd expect. He could probably make $30k/month by selling a guide on how to make $30k/month and doing seminars and such.

Either way, he's not making as much as he says he is in the way he says he does.

Thaed

I'm surprised people still spend money to advertise on his site. I've read some reports and most of the people I hear from were not overly impressed with the results.

But what do you think, Steve, you know more about this stuff than anyone. Is he full of crap? Is he just lying? Or is he really doing it? Because if he's really doing it, why aren't we all doing it?

Thaed

Short answer: No.
Long answer: Maybe, but not in the way you'd expect. He could probably make $30k/month by selling a guide on how to make $30k/month and doing seminars and such.

Either way, he'snotmaking as much as he says he is in the way he says he does.

I would guess that you're right, but I wish we had real numbers.

Apreche

It's very possible to make this kind of money. The Desktop Tower Defense Game was making that kind of money in its heyday.

The problem is that this isn't easy to do. It actually requires a shitton of work. Also, you have to do lots of ethically questionable things, and deal with ethically questionable people.

HMTKSteve

Yes, he does make that amount of money. With that said, most of his readers are via RSS and anyone who buys advertising on his site is wasting their money.

It is not easy to do. You have to build a large amount of content and then get people to notice you. JC did not just appear out of nowhere. He was already a millionaire before his blog went big.

He also can not get on digg or most other social media and he does not need to. He is one of the top 5 blogs in the "make money online" niche. That is not an easy niche to break into but it is very profitable. I tried breaking into that niche but the best I could do was $800 a month and it took a lot of work.

Don't forget, JC has farmed a lot of his writing out and I'm sure he pays those writers well.

His page view metric is crap. He does not break 500K monthly (or even 300K) and his uniques also suck. He makes up for it by having around 25K RSS subscribers.

If you lok at his numbers:

* Private Ad Sales: $14,380.00
* Affiliate Commissions: $8,257.55
* ReviewMe: $3,750.00
* Text Link Ads: $1,745.79
* Kontera: $1,000.00
* TTZ Media: $398.50
* FeedBurner: $17.21
* Subscription: $20.00
* Grand Total: $29,569.05

You can see that onsite (CPC) advertising is a very small percentage of his income. I'm not surprised FeedBurner is sucking for him because all they do now is put Google Ads into the feed for monetization. Good for Google, bad for you!

Those private ad sales are interesting because they mostly only show up on site and he has terrible site stats. I mean why would you pay $250 for one ad in a ten spot rotation? If you are lucky 30K people might see your ad.

He also makes good money in the aff business. He shows you a new aff business and you sign up. He then collects a commission off of your sales for months and months! Because he may have several thousand people sign up under him he makes a killing while you never make enough to get paid and eventually drop out of the program.