Web Revenue Blog Rankings: April Update

It’s been a couple of months since the original Web Revenue Blog Rankings were put out, so I thought it was time to put out an update as well as add a few more blogs to the list. Without further delay, here is the list:

Web Revenue Blog Rankings

You can see the raw data with the actual rankings from each service here.

Interesting Notes
Shoemoney closed the gap between his spot at #2 and Problogger at #1. There is no longer a huge difference there, yet Darren at Problogger still has a big lead in a few of the categories in the raw data.

JohnChow.com also closed the gap from #3 to Shoemoney at #2, so the battle at the top is getting tighter.

WhoIsAndrewWee.com debuted on the list tied for #10 in the rankings. Strange that I had missed this blog the first time around.

What is a “Web Revenue Blog”?
Blogs that focus on affiliate marketing, display advertising, contextual advertising, and actually helping people generate revenue in these ways by running their own site. This blog is a good example, as well as others in the list.

I’ve intentionally left out company blogs in this area like the YPN Blog, Inside Adsense, and others. I’ve also left out blogs that really just only cover news, or blogs that are really heavy on search engine news and optimization tips. The blogs in these rankings spend a lot of their time talking about making money from a website or blog.

Why make these rankings?
As I mentioned above, I don’t think any one service shows the whole picture. I was also interested to see how my blog stacked up agains the competition, and wanted to motivate myself. Additionally, I think this will help people find some good blogs that they can learn from, and it’s good to study these bloggers as the top ones are doing many things right.

How are the rankings calculated?
These rankings are a way to just calculate which blogs are the most popular and have the most influence in this industry. Therefore, I decided to try and find a way to combine link quantity, link authority, and actual site traffic. I took data from numerous sources, and then gave each blog a score for their ranking in that category. So if a blog was #1 in Alexa rank, they received a score of “1″ for that category. Then I averaged the scores across each data source to get an average score, and ranked the blogs in that order. I think it’d also be valuable to combine RSS subscribers into the rankings, but not all of the bloggers in the rankings publish their Feedburner subscriber count.

Is this perfect? No, and I’d be happy to hear comments on other data I should include or ways to change the formula.

The following is the data sources and why they were included:

Technorati Ranking – Provides the number of links from blogs to other blogs, and is the most commonly referred to blog ranking system. It relies on quantity of links from other blogs combined with the number of blogs doing the actual linking.

Alexa – Measures the number of visitors to a site based on Alexa toolbar installations on people’s computers. The data tends to favor the type of blogs we’re ranking, but can be easily skewed and is more accurate for the most popular sites out there.

Compete – Uses the number of unique visitors to a site based on USA visitors only. This data is also based on a panel like Comscore. Unfortunately this data is for the the USA audience only. It also only attempts to rank the top one million sites, and a few of the blogs in these rankings had no data in Compete.

Quantcast – A newer entry to the data sites, Quantcast measures site traffic by analyzing data provided by ISPs and various partners. They also allow website owners to put their code on your site so they can more accurately report your data. They also provide some other cool data about your site if you do this, and it can be very handy if you need to provide demographics to advertisers. A few blogs in these rankings also had no Quantcast data, so I’d recommend they ad the Quantcast code to make sure they get ranked.

Google Pagerank – Yes, I know Pagerank is just a number and doesn’t mean anything, but I think everyone can also agree that a site with a pagerank of 7/10 has a higher link authority than a site that has a 4/10. What that means for search results is irrelevant for these rankings, it’s more of a way to try and get some link authority into our data.

Yahoo Links – Google’s “link:” command doesn’t provide a full set of data, and we’re using Pagerank already, so I used Yahoo! Search to get a more full set of links to a site. Why do this when we have Technorati? Well, Technorati is only tracking blog links, while Yahoo is getting links from any type of site.

Feedback is welcome on how to improve these rankings and what blogs should be included that aren’t here now.