How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers
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Blogging for money has become a million dollar business, top bloggers make thousands of dollars each month for paid reviews and displaying ads on their sites. I took screenshots of the visible portion of some of the top blogs and counted how much of that was paid space. The screenshots below are taken from a maximized Firefox window with three toolbars, at a resolution of 1280×1024. You can click on each screenshot to see a full size shot with the ad areas highlighted in red.
Problogger runs two ad areas above the fold, one 477 x 70 banner and one 312 x 473 box with several ads. 17.76% of the total space is ads.
One of the better designed blogs, copyblogger displays just one ad area with multiple smaller ads, at 280 x 483 pixels. Total screen real estate: 115.920 pixels, 11.37% of screen space. Of all the sites i tested, copyblogger displays the less amount of ads.
Like Copyblogger, Dailyblogtips has a single ad area with six ad boxes at 284 x 467 pixel size. 13.01% of the displayed page was ad space.
John Chow is the most referenced blogger right now and has a total of 5 ad areas on the first screen of his blog. These include the donate link, “get reviewed on these blog” link and the such. 283.842 pixels for ads above the fold for a total of 27.86% ad space.
Steve Pavlina’s personal development blog. Still maintains a clean layout, mostly because of the adsense text ads. Three links including the donate button, a total of 206.820 pixels. 20.30% ad space.
Adsense-like vertical ads and image ads to the shoemoney store. Two of the ads run below the initial page displayed. 14.69% of the total space was ads.
Conclusions
This was a fun thing to research, and i have to admit i was surprised by the results. Selling ads slowly turned from a way to pay server costs using adsense to a full time job marketing products for many bloggers. One of the things that should be noted is that there’s more than one way to do this test. For example taking a screenshot of the full main page and not just the main screen radically alters the results, some of these bloggers run multiple ads below the main screen, while others don’t.
September 28th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
[…] Silverdome.org recently broke down some of the top blogger blogs and how much of there ads at taking up the real estate. Pretty interesting findings… Check it out here […]
September 28th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
Also u should note that as their fame increased so did their ads
but i can’t blame them one bit… u got to eat 
September 28th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Great research! This is really interesting stuff
September 28th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
In john chow’s case, you got to eat $800 dinners
September 28th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Interesting analysis, but I’m surprised you didn’t comment on the placement of the ads, which is a big factor. For example, Steve Pavlina might only be using 20%, but most of it is at the top of the content section, while all the other sites use space in the sidebar, a less viewed area..
September 28th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Very interesting breakdown. More interesting would be what their actual monthly ad revenue is…..
September 28th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
The more visitors you have to more money you earn, the more ads on your page. Nobody does it for free i guess..
September 28th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Nice survey. I’d like to see it done on the top 10 blogs on Technorati too to give a feel for how blogs not blogging about blogging are doing it.
One small note - the 468 x60 banner on ProBlogger is actually only serving ads half the time. The other half of the time it’s running banners that point people to different parts of ProBlogger (ie latest videos, blogging for beginners series of posts).
Still an internal ad I guess though.
Nice work
September 28th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
[…] See the mini study at Serverdome.org […]
September 28th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
There is a comment about the banners on th sidebar not being a visable area..yet this is considered on of the most clicked areas on the page..simply becuase the sidebar is there and users are more likely to click by mistake.
September 28th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Really this is food for thought being a new blogger. I am just running a side bar and hate the fact when you go down the page all of a sudden theres nothing to look at but the old posts. Once I get a new header done in the next few weeks I will be looking forward to getting a reveiw.
September 28th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Very interesting article and one from which you will be getting lots of links
September 28th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
I am glad I take the second place for running fewer ads :).
September 28th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
sincerely I thought percentages would be higher
I second john chow’s advertising amount, I think it’s ok, considering he keeps a lot of content oh his home page
September 28th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Maybe I should do something about my 0.00% ads, haha
September 28th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
[…] on Serverdome.org there is a very interesting post looking at around half a dozen blogs and what percentage of their […]
September 28th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Great research that was done to display these results.
September 28th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Interesting stuff. Steve Pavlina’s percentage surprised me most because there always seems to be so few ads on his site. He must blend them in really well.
September 28th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
I’ve been doing this for a long time. I call it “Content Mapping.” It’s great fun. Here’s my original post on how to do this:
http://www.webmaster-source.com/2007/07/29/content-mapping-how-is-your-layout-structured/
September 28th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Great article interesting thing about the placement is which ones generate the better click through rates but I think it depends on the audience for each blog.
September 28th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Fantastic article, i use the less is more philosiphy while i only have ~ 100 subscribers, when that grows i think you can increase the ads substantially.
September 28th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
If have taken the actual width and height of the blog the percentage will be lesser.
September 28th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Very interesting. The few times I have gone to Chow’s site I thought “there just isn’t much here”. Now I see why. Take the two large pictures, and there’s very little content above the fold.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Only 27.86%? Damn, I was aiming for 50%!
September 28th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
pretty cool research. now for all of us to deliberate and generate some insight….
September 28th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
[…] See the mini study at Serverdome.org […]
September 29th, 2007 at 1:08 am
Can you share the math behind this percentages. I have been trying to calculate them but I had different amounts.
Please let me know.
Francesco
September 29th, 2007 at 1:46 am
And the number #1 puchy famous blogger is … JOHN CHOW !
September 29th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Nice idea!
Next step is to automate it.
Which is what I was/am doing.
September 29th, 2007 at 4:48 am
Wow, i have to admit i am surprised at the attention and discussion here. I posted this right before i left from work yesterday and left it at that, and i woke up today to see 30 comments!
Darren (#9)
The same research on the technocrati top 10 would provide interesting results, it never even crossed my mind to take a look at the blogs there. I’ll admit i was much more interested to see the final result on blogs that i read every day.
redwall_hp (#21)
This is pretty much the same technique i used to get the ad spaces. After i had each ad area on it’s own layer, i copied it and started a new file in photoshop to see each box’s dimensions, calculated the pixels and added them up for each site to find the ratio to the total screen size.
Bob (#24)
I took only the main screen as the basis for this article because most people agree that the ads that display on the screen the user sees when he first loads a page without any scrolling are the most important. Also the length of the articles on each blog and the type of articles would skew the results too much, as each blog has larger total screen real estate.
Guadagnare e Fare Soldi (#29)
I will post the actual numbers for each ad area on Monday, i posted this from work and left all my files there. I wasn’t expecting so many people to be interested in the numbers.
Thanks everyone for your comments, i am glad people found this interesting. Something that I’d like to note is the reason i only took the ads that appear on the part of the screen loaded. All these blogs have a different layouts and a different way to show entries, for example problogger shows only excerpts on his main page, which reduces the page length considerably, while shoemoney posts images and full entries on his main page as well as having a static layout.
The two ways to count the total space would be either by a percentage of ads above the fold like i did, or by total pixel space on the whole first page, and only counting the ads displayed above the fold seemed fairer.
September 29th, 2007 at 5:13 am
excellent post, I learned a lot
September 29th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
[…] Blogging has become a million dollar business. Top bloggers make a daily living just by posting on their blog. At SearchEngineGaze we compiled a webpage that displays the latest posts of ProBlogger, JohnChow and Shoemoney to be found at the affiliate blog feed page. But how do they monotize the blog?At serverdome.org they have listed a few top blogs and converted the total display pixels and the total pixel space used for advertising. They used a 1280 1024 resolution for this test to be found at the How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers […]
September 29th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Wery interesting findings… who is making most of those ads?
September 30th, 2007 at 1:01 am
[…] did an interesting study of full time bloggers and their ad space used. The results probably won’t be shocking, with many having close to 25% of their content above […]
September 30th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Hm.. good info..
top blogger using the ads at strategic place..
and their percentage using almost same 10 -30%..
and johnchow the most percentage to put ads..
September 30th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
[…] is an interesting post on ServerDome.org that shows how some bloggers like Darren Rowse, ShoeMoney, CopyBlogger, JohnChow, and others place […]
September 30th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
[…] ha pubblicato venerdì un post (dal titolo How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers) che include una piccola ricerca effettuata su 6 noti […]
September 30th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Good research and findings. it says a lot
September 30th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
[…] Top Bloggers Display Their Ads Serverdome has an interesting article on how the top bloggers display their ads. The article outlines 6 of the top bloggers pages and […]
September 30th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
neat. Good research. curious to know who is making most every month
September 30th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
[…] has an article on how the top bloggers display their ads. The article outlines 6 of the top bloggers pages and gives you the percentage of ads above the […]
September 30th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
[…] a post to show you how top bloggers do it: How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers says: “Blogging for money has become a million dollar business, top bloggers make thousands […]
October 1st, 2007 at 2:21 am
Yikes, I wouldn’t like to see this kind of analysis on some of my sites. I recently had some of my forum members complaining that there’s hardly any content on the front page due to all of the ads.
October 1st, 2007 at 6:12 am
Now all we need is the ratio of traffic to ad space to earnings.
October 1st, 2007 at 6:45 am
But it would be great if those site can just put their advertisng on the post page and archives
October 1st, 2007 at 7:01 am
I sort of did my own survey a while back, which is why I am redoing my template to have more ads above the fold. I sort of knew John Chow had to be #1.
October 1st, 2007 at 10:01 am
Pretty even range of ad space vs. content for most of these guys. I am sure that the real estate on these pages are pretty highly valued. I was surprised SM is was a modest 15%…he must still have a lot to say
October 1st, 2007 at 10:06 am
Great information, I never knew or noticed some of the web sites I use every day and read had so many ads on it, wow!
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:17 am
How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers…
How the top bloggers display their ads……
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:22 am
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October 2nd, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Gives great insight when comparing one website to the other. Cool!
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:42 am
Nice info. It’s interesting to see how much of their blogs are used for advertising.
October 7th, 2007 at 1:58 am
great Information,
one should have to keep knowing how part of ad does well for his/her site/blog.
October 7th, 2007 at 11:59 am
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October 8th, 2007 at 5:00 am
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October 9th, 2007 at 4:09 am
It’s got to be a real pain to calculate the percentages…
October 9th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Sites I like the most and refer to the most, have the least amount of ads. Sites I have looked at but avoid have the highest ratio of ads. Also, sites with ads higher tend to rank lower on my scale. Strange that one: ads - good, lots of ads in your face - bad. You need to eat, and yet you need references and readers as well. Tough balance between those two things. Thanks for the most excellent analysis.
October 10th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Great research you did here would be nice to get a few more blogs researched though like mentioned above the top 10 blogs at technorati and then maybe break the ad space down to the most used affiliate programs by percentage on the top blogs
October 12th, 2007 at 12:42 am
[…] has an interesting article on the placement of advertisements by top bloggers. Make you really think hard on how you can optimize the placement of ads on your […]
October 17th, 2007 at 4:10 am
[…] See the mini study at Serverdome.org […]
October 24th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
You did a great job of researching this. Most of the blogs you mentioned in this post are those I subscribe to, but I’m not put off by the ads on their blogs. When you know there’s good content, and a welcome atmosphere for commenting (rather than those requiring a log in), it’s all good. Great job here!
November 12th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
[…] how much of the content are advertising space. The calculation was based on a method devised by Serverdome where they took screenshots of the visible portion of some of the top blogs and counted how much of […]
December 25th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Have a look at “Ads Minded Template” by Bryan Sapien for cool adsense ads for wordpress bloggers.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
[…] an interesting article by Serverdome on How the top bloggers display their ads. The ads was counted in percentages and numbers. Here’s their […]