So if you haven’t seen the press release or read a blog post about it, SV Moms Blog is shutting down their site and their 12 other regional sites. The reason, it’s not a sustainable business model. Translation, they aren’t making money. This reason baffles me.
Knowing nothing of their business practices I can’t help but wonder how a 13 website company with 400 bloggers consistently writing for this site with a traffic rank of around 140k and numerous ad spots sold on the site and incorporated throughout isn’t making money. My guess is that they either are paying their bloggers, management team or both too much money.
I know it’s not their hosting or platform as they use a custom typepad site and since they have said they’ll leave the blog online after they have shut down the services, I’m feeling my previous comment is more on the money, or lack of.
So what does it take to run a blog and make money? I guess it depends. For me I don’t make money on this blogging thing, I mean technically I do, but I have a full-time job and a few part-time jobs as well. Money from this blog is just nickels and dimes that combined with my other nickels and dimes from my PDF publishing company add up to a decent alcoholic outing once a month.
Sure many bloggers who can get the following and traffic volume of people like Daren Rowse make money, and while he has a few people working with him, he’s not paying 400 people to write for him or paying his management team exorbitant amounts of money.
In the end, I would love to take over facilitation of their site, not pay anyone to write for it, cut down the management team significantly and evaluate their salaries and keep what I view as a successful blogging community going strong.