Monetizing blogs: revenue streams of individual blogs

The growing popularity of Web 2.0 applications and social computing has fuelled many interesting phenomena surrounding these technologies. This study examines the value creating potential of blogging – one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications, from an individual blogger’s perspective. Drawing from previous research and recent practical developments, different revenue streams that bloggers can employ are identified. An empirical analysis of a selected sample of bloggers is used to assess how these revenue streams are actually used in practice. Our findings provide initial insights regarding a viable revenue model for blogging and also indicate the relative popularity and prevalence of the different revenue streams among blogs. In particular it is found that advertising is the most commonly employed means of realizing value in the form of revenues from blogging, with different forms of advertisements and different techniques to place the advertisements being used. The findings from this study can be extended to other domains of social computing and be used to formulate follow on research questions for future analysis.