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Ask HN: How much can you charge per blog sponsorship?

3 points by ffjffsfr ↗ HN
I'm running some blog, it's not big by any means but it gets some organic search engine traffic around 5k users per month every month for past 12 months. It's not huge, but I'd like to write more and I'm sure having some sponsorship would motivate me. I noticed some blogs have sponsors, e.g. https://ma.ttias.be/ there is sponsorship link. This blog is obviously much bigger than mine, but I wonder does it make sense to ask people for sponsorshop on my blog page? How much can I ask?

11 comments

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finid
You don't ask. If your blog is popular enough, people will contact you for sponsorship.

And you'll have to be hitting something like 25k users per month for them to even bother.

ffjffsfr
how will they know my blog is hitting 25k users per month? What if my blog will start hitting 25k (unlikely but who knows), how will they know about it
finid
People looking to promote their products or services are always looking for good sites. They'll find you.
finid
At this point don't worry about sponsors. Content is king, so concentrate on churning our good content. That will bring in more readers. In turn, that will bring in sponsors.
petercooper
To be honest, I'm not so sure. Especially in the tech scene, enough people are anti ads/sponsorship that I'd generally avoid reaching out unless I saw they were already doing it or were keen to monetize. Even having a sample unit or "hello bar" mentioning you're taking on sponsorships would increase the likelihood of someone reaching out, all IMHO of course.
finid
Sponsorship can take forms other than display ads. You can't block text-link ads and guest posts.
petercooper
Oh, what I meant was that often people who run blogs or open source projects are anti-ads/monetization and so dislike being approached by companies wanting to give them money.
petercooper
So I started a Ruby news blog back in 2004-2005 to help build a platform to promote my Ruby book. No sponsors for a year or two but then Geoffrey Grosenbach of Peepcode reached out and offered me $100/month if I put a banner link to Peepcode in the side bar. So I took it.. and the next month I had about 10 companies reach out wanting to do the same thing!

First lesson.. if you start running sponsors even before you're getting paid for them, people will come out of the woodwork.

Eventually I had the aforementioned blog up to several thousand $ per month, but gave it up to focus on email newsletters instead and now there are 9 of us doing it full time, still all funded by sponsorships.

FWIW, I would sponsor developer related blogs if they would help us reach more potential subscribers (or even pay $ per signup), so I think there's a ton of potential out there for both blogs and open source projects.

ffjffsfr
that's inspirational, so you're basically saying to try to put some text saying sponsors welcome, show blog stats and wait for someone to show up and offer something and just take offer?
petercooper
You don't even need the big stats. Just hang it off of a single number and invite people to get in touch. TBH, more information up front is more likely to reduce the number of leads. Just say you're getting, say, 20K pageviews per month or that you have X number of subscribers (to RSS, Twitter, whatever).
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