Lisa and Brian Sugar operate blogs for women that have won ads from companies like Chanel and Sony.
The dream of quitting the day job and making a living from blog revenue has proved to be far-fetched for most bloggers. But a few entrepreneurs, like the Sugars, have found success in blog networks.
Such networks put blogs on various topics under some form of central control, like a digital-era Condé Nast. Though they do not command nearly the same ad rates that glossy magazines do, they are attracting ad dollars while magazines are losing them.
Sugar’s ad revenue increased 20 percent in the first half of the year, and the company is on track to double its revenue and turn a profit this year, said Mr. Sugar, the company’s chief executive. Gawker Media, one of the earliest and biggest blog networks, reported that ad revenue was up 45 percent in the first half of this year.
Both companies are private, and neither would disclose more specific figures, but by some estimates the larger networks have annual revenue in the low tens of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, advertising revenue for magazines dropped 21 percent in the first half, and the number of ad pages sold dropped 28 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
The blog networks that have survived the downturn in advertising and the explosion of competing content on the Web credit their obsessive coverage of narrow topics, along with business models that reach beyond advertising.
“It’s actually really hard creating compelling content that brings an audience,” Mr. Sugar said.
Hobbyist bloggers first got the idea that their online entries could be profitable in 2002 when Nick Denton, a former reporter for The Financial Times, started what would become Gawker Media. The catty network quickly grew into a powerhouse, and it now has eight blogs, 20 million monthly readers and more than 150 full- and part-time employees. When Jason Calacanis sold his blog network, Weblogs Inc., to AOL for a reported $25 million in 2005, the notion that blogging could be a business was cemented.
Read more here: Ad Shift Throws Blogs a Business Lifeline