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.
Very true, Chris:
Very few people are blogging “just for fun”, even though that’s what a lot of bloggers would like to have you thinking.
Hey Wes,
Yes it’s a good idea to determine when you get started down this path if you’re in it for the money or for fun. I do believe it’s possible to have both, but even using my own example: it would have been more fun to keep doing websites related to video games but there is very little money to be made unless you can take it to a huge level.
Chris
Hey Chris,
Yeah, I totally agree the key is finding niches you enjoy that also have reasonable profitability potential. I did learn most of this Internet stuff by starting sites “mostly” for fun (knowing I’d want to make money from them one day). However, I definitely wish I would have thought about the path to monetization a bit more before spending all of that time building and then just hoping for the best.
I’d say even today that’s still one of my most costly mistakes.
Its indeed true that no matter how much content do you have or what aount of traffic do you have, you still need money too keep your website running. What follows next is managing up resources for everything. Every website just can’t be wikipedia.
Thanks Chris. Following your advice, because it is sensible common sense advice, it is possible to make a decent living online AND enjoy doing it at the same time. It all comes down to personal attitudes and what one considers a decent living.
Download Squad was owned by Arianna Huffington who has one idea of what is profitable.
I own my sites so I have the luxury of working for money, hobby or something in between.
I have this quirk that I have to enjoy what I am doing, so that cuts out black hat and wearing my fingertips down on the keyboard chasing Dollars. So I sacrifice a few dollars to enjoy building sites. But then I don�t work for Huffington.