Making a Living Online: The Rise and Fall of Banner Ads
One thing I use Dying Breed for is giving people a behind-the-scenes look at what we do. And one of the questions I get asked most often on that front is: “How do you make a living online?” Basically, people want to know how we generate an income from blogging and podcasting.
Usually, the question comes from people who are interested in making a go at being a full-time creative or curious friends with traditional 9-to-5 jobs who find it hard to believe you can make enough money putting stuff up on the internet (for free even!) to pay for a mortgage.
It’s an understandable question. The online economy is still so new in the sweep of human history that people wonder how it works.
And it has to work not only for Kate and me to support ourselves and our family, and to make each of us investing 60 hours a week in our jobs worthwhile, but also simply to keep our endeavors — the Art of Manliness, The Strenuous Life, and Dying Breed — going. Each of the prongs in that ecosystem — what you could call McKay Inc. — costs money just to keep running. With AoM, we have to pay for a server to host the website, a service to send out our free newsletter, an audio engineer to fine-tune the podcast episodes, and more. TSL has been pretty expensive to run, with costs for web development, shipping and fulfillment, and so on. And for work across our platforms, we pay Ted Slampyak for his illustrations and Jeremy Anderberg as our lone part-time employee. It all adds up.
So the revenue-generating side of things has to work for our endeavors to continue, and how that’s worked has changed a lot over our almost 20-year publishing career.
In a new series, I’m going to unpack the history of those changes and explain how we make money online, while also endeavoring to keep the creative passion and value-imparting mission central — and not selling our souls. My aim is not only to satisfy people’s curiosity as to how the online economy has and does hum, but also to offer what I think is a fascinating window into how and why the internet looks the way it does today. Changes in how online content generates revenue don’t just affect the finances of its creators, but also alter the internet as a whole — and how the average user experiences it. The history of revenue models on the internet is the history of the internet itself.
So consider this an in-depth insider’s look at the online publishing biz. From the perspective of a completely bootstrapped, mom-and-pop operation running out of a house in Tulsa, OK (not exactly a hotbed of online publishing!).
To kick things off, I’m going to walk you through how we first started generating revenue with AoM — the granddaddy of online monetization and what some have even called the original sin of the internet.
I’m talking, of course, about the humble website banner ad.
