Blogging starts to pay off as advertisers see Web potential

A year ago, blogger Glenn Reynolds joked to a reporter that he was making “burger-flipping” wages from the trickle of funds readers donated to his popular Instapundit.com website.

These days, Reynolds can afford to order steak. Since he began accepting advertisements on his site five months ago, Instapundit.com has been bringing in several thousand dollars a month.

It’s starting to look as if bloggers can make a living from their sites, thanks to an advertising boom. Companies who want to reach specific consumers -- current-events mavens, conservative PhDs, cellphone fanatics -- are hooking up with blogs that can deliver those eyeballs. Some politically oriented blogs are also riding an election-year advertising wave, but industry experts expect the trend to last well beyond November.

“One of the big overriding themes over the last few quarters has been the shift from traditional media to the online space,” says Carlo Alvarez, director of media planning of the New York firm Special Ops Media, which creates nontraditional and Web-based marketing campaigns for film studios, record labels and consumer product clients.

A year ago, however, many bloggers, especially the more politically oriented variety, were unsure that they’d ever do any better financially than collecting occasional cash “tips” from readers to spend on maintaining their sites -- costs that can range into hundreds of dollars a month for the bigger blogs.

For folks such as Reynolds, a law professor who blogs for fun, making money didn’t matter much, but to other bloggers, finding a way to make blogging pay the rent was a more pressing concern.

Reynolds, who teaches at the University of Tennessee, says he didn’t have high hopes when he started taking ads. But in February he signed on with a firm called Blogads, which describes itself as a service connecting bloggers and advertisers. The results have been a pleasant surprise, he says: “I’m quite pleased to be wrong.”

Blogads offers ad rates tied to its clients’ Internet traffic -- the more visitors, the higher the rate for an ad on that site. Given that some sites have been running as many as 15 ads at a time, several of Blogads’ top clients are likely clearing as much as $3,000 to $5,000 a month.