How Much Do Bloggers Make? Case Study: Heather B. Armstrong AKA Dooce
Heather B. Armstrong, also known as Dooce 
, runs an extremely successful website that is represented by Federated Media. According to the information available from Federated Media, Dooce.com gets around 5,190,000 page views per month, a statistic that is consistent with the Quantcast measurements of her traffic. Through Federated Media, Dooce offers four different types of ads: 125×125 square button, leaderboard, a wide skyscraper, and a medium rectangle. In addition, Dooce offers text ads through AdBrite, some Google AdSense ads, and special advertising arrangements through private companies, such as the Momversation series in which she is featured.
The minimum buy for the 125×125 square button on Dooce is 340,000 impressions, which constitutes a 5% share of the total impressions in a two-week period, and costs $1,547.00. The minimum buy for leaderboard ads on Dooce is
170,000 impressions, which is a 5% voice and costs $2,762.50. The minimum buy for wide skyscraper ads on Dooce is 130,000 impressions, which constitutes 5% of the total impressions in a two-week period. For this 5% share of the “voice” (in wide skyscraper ads) of Dooce.com, it will cost you $2,112.50. A rectangle ad on Dooce costs $2,336.00 for a minimum buy of 130,000 impressions, which is also 5% of of the total “voice” of rectangle ads on Dooce.com in a two-week period. Per week, a text ad on Dooce costs $125 (or a month package for $450). One can only guess what the Momversation deal is.
Source: Federated Media
What does this mean?
Well, if Dooce sells out all of her Federated Media ads on a given two-week period, rectangle, wide skyscraper, 125×125 button, and leaderboard, she would grossing about $175,160 per two-week period for Federated Media. There are no limits to text ads, but she usually has five or so of them, so that is another $600 or so per week. These numbers put together would mean the site grossed about $4.5 million per year total. But there are two caveats: 1) Dooce probably does not sell out ALL of her ads, every week of the year, particularly in January, when advertising sales are low; and 2) You can bet that the advertising networks are taking the lion’s share of that revenue, possibly up to about a 70% of it, in fact. So here’s where the guestimating begins.
If Dooce were to sell out all of her ads for the year, my guess is that her share runs from about $1.35 million to $2.25 million per year. Based on information for the current two-week period (May 14-27, 2009), I am guessing that Dooce must maintain about an 75-90% full rate on ad space, since only 18% of her skyscraper ads are still available, 25% of her 125×125 buttons, and 11% of her rectangle ads are available. Her leaderboards are sold out. I am sure this number fluctuates, but without getting hard numbers from either Dooce or Federated Media–and I’m not asking, but I’m guessing they won’t tell–this is as close as I’m getting. So my semi-educated guess is that Armstrong Media’s gross revenues are between $1 million-$2 million a year. There is likely a lot of leeway in this figure, due to the multiple ad sizes available and the different projects she takes on, such as Momversation and her book deals.
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