According to John Chow, he first started monetizing his blog on 17th September 2006 via Google Adsense alone. By the end of that month i.e. 13 days later, he already made more than USD350, i.e. about USD27 per day. He relied mostly on digg.com and google search traffic in the early days.

2 months later (for the month of November 2006), he’s already pulling in more than RM7,000, mostly from Adsense and Vibrant IntelliTXT. That is off 217,876 unique visitors. In fact, for the month before (October 2006) he got even more unique visitors: 229,144.

A year later (November 2007), he’s on almost RM90,000. I think that’s more than what 99.999% of what Malaysians are earning!

And he’s not using Adsense at all.

Most of his income comes from Private Ad Sales (almost USD13,000), affiliate commissions (about USD6,500) and ReviewMe (paid posting) at USD4,400.

What’s most surprising perhaps is the fact that he had LESS unique visitors in November 2007 than in November 2006. In November 2007, he *only* had 185,386 unique visitors.

That means traffic went down, even when his blog is now more established / well known, yet income went up more than 12 times. In other words, he has a very high eCPM: USD84.19: his blog makes over USD80 every time 1,000 pages are viewed.

How did he do this? In his own words:

The high eCPM rate was achieved by maximizing as many revenue opportunities as possible while still preserving the user experience.This blog started with only Google AdSense. Since then, I have experimented with dozens of monetization methods. Some have worked really well while others were a complete flop. The key is to always be tweaking and not stand still. If you haven’t touch up your revenue mix in the past six months, it’s time to get your hands dirty.

His expenses for the month were very little: USD566.52 for Google Adwords advertising, and USD25 for a private ad. His hosting is sponsored.

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