RE: Blogspot has more traffic than NY Times?

Susan Mernit commented that NYTimes is offering a better return right now, figuring that Blogspot pages are monetized at about $1 per page, while the Times' pages are probably bringing in something like $20 a page.

My comments to Susan are that the math can't be that easy--there's a few other things to consider.

Less Overhead = Better Profit Position
First of all, blogspot has to pay considerably less per page it puts on the web. In fact, I can't imagine the cost to serve each page topping more than a few cents each.

Without a large staff, writers, editors, assistants, etc, to pay, if blogspot only brings in $1 per page, but 90 cents of that is pure profit, it may be better than what the Times is making per page.

Grocery Store Economics
Second, though traffic between the two sites may be similar today, blogspot has a much faster potential for growth as they have the equivilent of thousands of writers, posting passionate articles about microsubjects.

The Times has what I consider a practical limit on the amount of content they can generate because of logistical and monetary constraints. The editorial process itself causes a limitation to the content-generation process. This barrier is not necessarilly a problem, in fact it is essential in some degree as the gateway role of the mainstream media, a distinction important to note here.

However, from just a monetary standpoint, the viral growth potential Blogspot has due to blogging's killer-app popularity has the potential to hand Blogger and unbelievably huge lump of cash, thanks to some Grocery Store Economics, which basically says:

You don't have to sell your products for a huge profit to make a huge profit--you just have to sell a lot of your product.

Think about it. If the Stop & Shop around the corner can earn 10 cents of pure profit per item in your shopping cart (after all their expenses, salaries, etc.), andyou have, say, 15 items, they will make $1.50 on your business today.

If they can checkout an average of 5 customers every 3 minutes, they will make $150 pure profit, per hour, per lane. If they can have enough customers to keep an average of 3 aisles open all day and they are open just 12 hours a day (half-as-long as most stores these days), shareholders will earn $5,400.00 of pure profit each day.

That's just under $2 Million dollars per year of pure profit for one store. Not bad for tomatoes.

Other conversations on this topic: Rick Bruner started it, Susan Mernit (who I am commenting back to), Steve Rubel, PC4Media (interesting!), and Joe Malchow chimed in. And, Technorati proves there are others.

Filed Under: nytimes blogspot blogger traffic citizen journalism alexa public micropersuasion susanmernit