I’ve stressed the importance of treating your blog like a business multiple times in the past. It doesn’t matter how “cool” your website is you because if you’re in the business to make money you still need to find a way to bring in money with your website. Today courtesy of AOL I have yet another example of this principal in action:

AOL Owned Download Squad Shut Down

Well, here we are. More than four years after launching, Switched and DownloadSquad are unfortunately being closed… Src

Why Did Download Squad Get Shut Down?

Download Squad was a tech blog that covered tech news relating primarily to free software apps and tools. Web visitors that are looking for free solutions to their problems aren’t worth as much as web visitors that are looking to pay for something. In other words, a software blog about various paid software solutions might be less popular than a blog on free software solutions but the traffic would be more valuable on a per visitor basis because you have a direct path to monetize that traffic through affiliate software sales.

It’s very difficult to make a profitable blog on quantity of traffic alone and the closure of Download Squad is just another example to look at. It sucks for the employees that lost their jobs when the blog closed but the decision presumably came down to Arianna Huffington made changes to focus on more profitable web properties. She is the editor in chief of 56 sites owned by AOL (including Download Squad).

What You Can Learn

Don’t let the focus on making money from your website crush your dreams to make a successful web property in a low value niche, just realize that it is much more difficult to make money from traffic that doesn’t have a clear path to monetization. I bet Download Squad was profitable based on it’s traffic figures, but it was obviously one of the lower earning properties or it wouldn’t have been shut down.

My six figure website sale was a product review blog and it was easy to monetize that website because I could sell the products I reviewed as an affiliate. If my blog was about reviewing something free I wouldn’t have been able to sell it for the price that I did because it would have never been making as much money as it was.