How does toptut.com make money?

Ok, this post is yet again made due to continuous requests from people (uuhm like two or three in total) who are interested to know how much this blog earns and from what. First of all, it’s new, it was only launched in December 2006 and was not heavily monetized right from the start, as my main aim was to get it ranked good and have a high PageRank, so I actually started to work on the material side of it only 2 months ago. Hence, at present, this is how it works for me (I refer to toptut.com’s revenue only).

Google Adsense - my most beloved source, you can see I put it in “we use and recommend” box. With the present design the ads are allover the place (by the way, you can read the blog without ads through the feed, if you subscribe), so I am hoping for increasing the revenue (up until last week it was only a text banner at the end of each post). Roughly speaking, so far (this April) it was making about 1,10$ a day.

Text Link Ads - another money making program I strongly recommend to use. Unlike Adsense, it won’t take up much space as these are “just” text links. I made 22,50$ this month from 3 text links ads sold on this site and 50$ from 2 new publishers I referred, so let us say, compared to Adsense, TLA occupies little space and bring bigger revenue.

ReviewMe - this month one review was sponsored by an advertiser at ReviewMe and put 30$ in my little porcelain piggie.

Adbrite - I don’t use it “full time” on this blog, no interstitials ads, no inline ads, no banners. There is only one text link ad that has been sold here (I mean I only provide space for one text link advert) and it was sold with 0,10 $ CPM. Since I only put it here 2 days ago, and the ad was sold yesterday for 3 ad companies, I still have no clue how much will it bring me, so let’s leave it open for now.

BlogsVertise - As unbelievable as it sounds, they are one of my main revenue sources. They work on a basis of offering you to review sponsors or place text links. They either assign you a task or you can grab one every day (!), if you want. As been lazy I don’t track the tasks and only choose from offers they send me by email, naturally I decline most of them (low paying and irrelevant) so from the very few I did pick, I made 68,50$ this month.

Direct Ad Sales- I don’t do it often as I have no time and it’s a lot of hassle updating the website’s code. It’s far easier for me to sign up with network-based-ads that will do the job for me looking for advertisers and displaying ads though .xml or java file. However, some offers just came by to me and I did accept. This month ad space on this blog was sold for, if i am not mistaken, 20$, which is dramatically less than last month because like I just said, I do not look for it anymore.
How much do I spend on toptut.com?

First months I invested in promotion and some advertising (mainly purchasing links, not AdWords and the likes). However, I’d not count it in anymore as there was pretty impressive revenue from manually sold ads and direct sponsors, which paid out well. At present, I hardly spend money on promotion, the content and useful downloads promote themselves and I guess the only expenses at present that I can think of are the hosting service and related small fees here and there.

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Grand total:

Estimated 32$ from Adsense, + 72,50$ from TLA, + 30$ from ReviewMe, + 68,50$ from Blogsvertise, + 20$ from direct ad sale … This comes to 223$.
To be honest, this blog works really different for me; normally, the rest of my sites are primarily based on Adsense and it’s been their main source of revenue together with Text link Ads, which work good on all my php-based sites and bring something, depending on site’s ranking and traffic. I know I could be making more with affiliate sales, which I just don’t do, don’t even know why. I might consider it in the future but for now there is no room for it. I could have enabled inline advertising by Vibrant IntelliTXT or Contera (or even Adbrite) but I believe it uglifies the website, misleads the reader and annoys the visitors who get a small window over the text every time he rolls the mouse over the inlined words. I also pass on many other opportunities such as monetizing the feed, or selling links in previous posts, which I know some bloggers go. For now, this is how toptut.com works and I am pretty happy with it, as it allows me to concentrated on content creation and not on making money. I hope this was revealing enough and pours some light over the material side of toptut.com. I am hoping to make another post in a few months from now, showing off a doubled income and maybe even some newly discovered networks.