Singapore blogger make money online

BLOGGERS, and the syndicates which encourage them, are quietly changing the way people turn their online opinions into pots of gold.

By signing up with online ad-placement services like Google Adsense as well as local ones like Advertlets, Blog2U and NuffNang, top bloggers here are ringing in thousands of dollars per month.

According to media services firm ZenithOptiMedia, the total ad market for Singapore in 2008 is worth about $2.07 billion. Google estimates the value of the local online ad market at 3 to 5 per cent of the total ad spending.

Given all that moolah, legions have signed up with the ad placement firms. NuffNang has 13,000 local bloggers, Advertlets 12,000 while the latest entrant Blog2U has 5,000 - but there are overlaps. Google keeps mum about its numbers.
Celeb blogger Dawn offered this caveat: 'Making substantial amounts of money only apply to blogs with substantial daily readership. For lesser-known bloggers, I think it may be harder to make money.'

Although blogging provides her with a 'decent full-time salary', she doesn't rely on NuffNang alone. She also uses services like Google Adsense and Adbrite.

'The ad campaigns are not frequent enough,' she said.

But she hopes a wildcard will come into play.

'If NuffNang grows big enough to provide its bloggers with a regular stream of advertisers, I have no doubt I could be earning a full-time income from just NuffNang alone.'
Indeed, Singaporeans come up as the top bloggers regionally. Mr Derek Callow, marketing manager of Google Southeast Asia, said: 'There are more active bloggers in Singapore (using our Blogger product) than in any other country in Asia Pacific.'

For the handful of very successful opinion-casters - and they are just part-timers, mind you - the earnings are more than loose change.

There's 39-year-old Dr Leslie Tay, who likely earns a five-figure sum as a general practitioner. In addition, he gets a small pile monthly just by posting reviews and mouth-watering pictures of various hawker food on his blogsite, ieatishootipost.sg.

Nineteen-year-old, part-time model Peggy Heng pockets between $500 and $2,000 monthly while model and celebrity blogger Dawn Yang, 23, gets anything between $4,000 and $6,000.

Not bad for personal rantings about their daily lives and the occasional commentary on social issues.

How the money-making goes

ALL three parties - bloggers, ad placement firms and advertisers - stand to gain.

Bloggers earn money in several ways. The traditional way - a la Adsense - was that Google would place banner ads which match the content on the blogger's site. Bloggers are paid for page views every time a netizen clicks on the ad. In blogspeak, these are called 'impressions' and 'click-throughs'.

Bloggers can also be paid a fixed sum when an advertiser places a banner ad on their homepage for a period of time. Blog2U, for instance, pays about $5 for a banner ad which stays on a blog for 30 days.

'Should the blogger be selected, they will be notified via e-mail about the type and duration of the campaign.'

Through such ads, a blogger can pull in anything from $50 to $2,000 a week. According to NuffNang, a high-profile blogger like Wendy Cheng (xiaxue.blogspot.com), who attracts 20,000 readers daily, could get about $1,000 a week.

Bloggers can also be paid for talking about new products and services. That extra - in the case of Advertlets - is anything between $15 and $250 per post.

Said Josh Lim, founder of Advertlets: 'This service makes sure that even lower traffic bloggers get a piece of the action.'

While most bloggers earn from local vendors and through the syndicates, Sabrina Ong, 23, gets about 70 per cent of her income from advertisers directly from the United States.

'They contact me directly and ask me to blog about a certain product or service. I get between US$50 (S$68) and US$500 for each post,' said the business and law student who is attending classes at a private school here.

Certainly, the ad placement firms take a cut too. NuffNang charges advertisers from $1,000 to $50,000 per week for an ad. It declined to reveal total revenue.

Advertisers, from Nokia and GAP to Hewlett-Packard, feel that their spending is justified.

Lim Wee Khee, the head of Nokia's sales unit marketing division, considers the Nokia N82 ads which are placed on teen blogs, an 'innovative way' to reach its customers.

She said: 'We aim to garner more depth and visibility in the virtual space through placements on suitable blogs.'

The big picture

TO BE sure, the blab-and-get-paid trend is not new. In the US, where selling online opinion is estimated to be a billion-dollar business, the commercialising of opinions has been around since 2003.

Take the teams behind tech blogs like TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Engadget. In the case of Gizmodo, the six-year-old site attracts up to 50 million 'eyeballs' a month. This lets them demand a hefty price tag of US$3,000 for each ad placed on its site.

Right, this is where the wary takes one step back. Remember the expression 'If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is'? Would that wisdom apply here?

Dr Lim Sun Sun, assistant professor at the faculty of arts and social sciences at the National University of Singapore, believes that sites like NuffNang and Advertlets could well become 'industry standard' one day.

'The Internet is such an unpredictable environment that a service which may first appear fly-by-night may well become tomorrow's industry standard.

'If you think about it, services such as eBay must have appeared suspect in the first instance but are established and widely accepted today,' she said.

Even so, how full is that pot of gold?

For student-model Peggy, the few hundred bucks (and up to $2,000 a month) fuels weekend shopping jaunts.

Ming Shen admits that some of his members earn only $1.68 per week.