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
| Blog | Score |
|---|---|
| 1. Problogger | 1.50 |
| 2. ShoeMoney | 2.83 |
| 3. JohnChow | 3.33 |
| 4. Jensense | 6.33 |
| 5. AffiliateTip | 6.67 |
| 6. 5 Star Affiliate | 8.17 |
| 7. TamingTheBeast | 8.67 |
| 8. ConversionRater | 9.83 |
| 8. JoelComm | 9.83 |
| 10. MEMWGA | 11.17 |
| 10. WhoIsAndrewWee.com | 11.17 |
| 12. AOJon | 12.33 |
| 13. Cumbrowski.com | 12.67 |
| 13. JonWaraas.com | 12.67 |
| 15. LeeDodd | 12.83 |
| 15. Jangro.com | 12.83 |
| 17. Mind Valley Labs | 13.00 |
| 18. TylerCruz | 13.50 |
| 19. EarnersBlog | 14.17 |
| 20. WebPublishingBlog | 14.33 |
| 21. WebsitePublisher | 14.83 |
| 21. CostPerNews | 14.83 |
| 23. Here.org.uk | 16.17 |
| 24. BryanLe.net | 18.67 |
| 25. HarpzOn.com | 19.33 |
| 26. ExWebJunkie.com | 20.00 |
| 27. BobSchmuck.com | 20.50 |
| 28. LeeBandoni.com | 20.83 |
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.
Interesting comparison.
The blog must be focused exclusively on making money online?
Let me know if Daily Blog Tips could be considered for the next round.
definitely a really interesting analysis. I’m another one wondering if I can be included next time round? 🙂
Also number 26 is labelled as Costpernews which is already included at 21. I think 26 is Exwebjunkie instead.
Nice work though!
Hi Daniel,
The focus doesn’t have to be exclusive, as long as a decent percentage of the content is about generating revenue for the blog it would make sense.
Fraser, thanks on the error, I just corrected it. I’ll check out your blog for the next round as well.
That would be great Pat 🙂 Just don’t try to check it out in the next few hours as I’m in the middle of moving hosts and suffering a bit of downtime. Should be back to normal tomorrow!
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Thanks Pat! So glad 5 Star made the list. Just blogged about it to send more people here to discover all the other great blogs on the list that can help them learn to earn more!
Happy selling everyone!
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Thanks for the mention! It’s really exciting for me to have been ranked.
Looking forward to breaking into the teens next month.
Bryan
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I love your blog but your chart has just made me realise I need to get linkbuilding 🙂 Im sure you put in that comment on my blog something about a link in your blogroll !
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Tks for the mention, Pat.
Hey Pat, just found this site tonight and it’s a pretty cool service you’ve got going. Nice way to compare how one measures up against others out there. Thanks for putting it together. If you have time, check out my site for the next round.. Thanks a bunch.
Aww I’m sad to see my blog isn’t on the list 🙁 Maybe one day.
My technorati rank has been frozen for a few months because they’ve stopped indexing new posts.
Got them to fix it today, not sure whether it’d move Earners Blog up the list or not 😛
Cheers
Stu
I’ll check it out Stu, thanks for letting me know.
Hi Pat,
I blog about Internet business and that essentially is about making money online.
This post alone I would think qualifies me for this list:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/687/make-money-online-blogging-2/
Anyway – take a look, I’d love to see where my blog fits in your list.
Cheers,
Yaro
Am I missing somthing here ? I don’t see any revenue metnioned, just rankings. I guess it’s about blogs that blog about revenue, but it would have been nice to see some actually figures about revenue.
Correct, it is just about blogs that blog about making money on the web. Adding revenue into the mix would be great, but since nobody publicly reports their revenue it isn’t too easy to put that in the mix.
OK thanks for clearing that up (I am a bit slow). It would be nice to know how much the big guys make, so to get the ball rolling I can reveal that I have made $12 in 2 months with my blogs ! 🙂
Excellent list. Please continue to update and grow it. I subscribed to the top 3, but the rest I never went to. My blog has finally broken through a few limits and become profitable that last few months (more than $50 a month now) so I find myself looking for advice on tweaking and squeaking more money out of the clicks I have now.
Many thanks for the mention Pat. Cheers!!
This is an interesting way of ranking blogs. I hope to make it one day into the list. Hope to get the breakthrough soon to start earning a decent income with my blog. Btw, I also think that it would be nice to include more metrics into the ranking system like earnings per blog and adsense revenues earned since this is about blog revenue earned.
Thanks for the mention!
I’m actually the only blog ranked on Google for the term “affiliate marketing”. I still haven’t done SEO either! I think it’s time to start now seeing as lists like these are on the rise. Woot!
Nice list nonetheless. Maybe the higher ranked blogs will start getting the tons of emails and IM’s I get on a daily basis asking them for help instead. I sure wouldn’t mind losing that part of the whole “web celeb” status.
are you assuming the lists are all focus on the same topic, which is making money online? does the amount money made online being considered as one of the factors?
Many of you have suggested including actual revenue in the rankings. I agree that’d be great, however the revenue information is not publicly found, and that would require all the blogs on the list to disclose their revenue. Even if they all did agree to do that, it’d be impossible to verify they were being accurate.
Hey Pat,
I was wondering if this was a quarterly ranking?
Or are there plans to do a followup?
Alexa seems to be fairly wonky lately.