Two full time highly successful bloggers who quit their day job - where's their money coming from???

I was surfing the Internet when I came across an interesting article at howstuffworks{dot}com. The article profiles two full time bloggers who, according to HSW, quit their day job thanks to blogs that garner an amount of traffic that any Warrior would die for. Or maybe kill for when you see their traffic stats!

For this case study I am defining "quitting their day job" as an amount that exceeds $2000 a month USD. Since the article does not tell us how much money their blogs generate per month, I think $2000 a month is a reasonable amount to assume a full time blogger needs in order to cover the cost of rent, utilities, and food. You could argue that $2000 a month is on the low side.

To start off this case study, I'll post a direct quote taken from the pages of HowStuffWorks{dot}com. The quote deals with the subject of How to Make Money on the Internet. I italicized the quotes. The quotes feature two highly successful blogs that generate an extremely large volume of traffic:

If you have a particular passion for something, whether it's a hobby or an obsession, and you have something to say about it, blogging could be a profitable way to pour out your endless stream of thought. The key here, as with many other services on the Internet, is in selling advertising.

After starting up a personal blog, many writers sign up for ad services like Google AdSense, which post those familiar sponsored links you often see at the top and on the sides of Web sites. The more times your blog readers click on those ads, the more money you'll make through the ad service. This works fine if you're a casual blogger, and you may make some extra spending money.

But if the blog is consistently interesting, well-written and really takes off, you may be approached by companies who want to reach your fan base with graphical advertising around your blog. Some of the more successful blogs, like I Can Has Cheezburger? and Boing Boing, have become pop-culture phenomena, and their creators have been able to quit their day jobs and blog full time because of the money they make from advertisers.

I went to Alexa to do some research and this is what I found: I see that cheezeburger{dot}com has over 12,000 sites linked to it and is ranked, get this, 297 out of 100,000 million websites! From that, I think one can assume that cheezburger{dot}com is worth somewhere around $20 million dollars. I make that assumption based on the history of HotOrNot{dot} com. I think that the $20 million dollar estimate is a fair assumption to make for two reasons: 1) the two young men who started HotOrNot{dot}com, James Hong and Jim Young, sold their website for a rumored $20 million! And 2) when Hong and Young sold their site their traffic ranking was nowhere near as great as cheezburger{dot}com's ranking. Back then HotOrNot{dot}com was ranked about the same as it is now, positioned at 11,000.

Boingboing{dot}net is just like cheezburger{dot}com in that it has the same mind-blowing traffic statistics to die for. According to Alexa it has 41,021 sites linked to it and is ranked 1,628, which is a fantastic position to rank! Once again I think we can assume that if the owner of boingboing{dot}net sold their website they'd earn around $20 million dollars just like the owners of HotOrNot{dot}com pocketed for their $20 million dollar website.

But what's interesting, and odd, is that when you visit the two case studies, cheezeburger{dot}com and boingboing{dot}net, you don't see any links for a Clickbank-like product or links for Google Adsense anywhere on their page, which I think is unusual given the huge amount of traffic they generate. Inquiring minds want to know, what's up with that? Help me understand:

1) Since there are no PPC ads on their website, how are they able to generate a full time income that allows them to quit their day job? In other words, show me the money, please go to their website linked below, take a look at it, and tell us how they're generating income from their website.

2) If you had a million dollar website that generated a HUGE, mouth-watering amount of traffic just like the two case examples generate, wouldn't you, if you owned one of those websites, try and maximize your earning potential using PPC ads like Adsense or Clickbank?

3) Put yourself squarely in the shoes of the webmaster who owns cheezeburger{dot}com and boingboing{dot}net. Why do you think they're ignoring the potential to earn money, a lot of money, with PPC? Why on earth do you think they decided to give a thumbs down to PPC when they're receiving all that traffic, what are they thinking, what's their strategy?

Case study #1: Boing Boing
Case study #2: I Can Has Cheezburger? - Lolcats n Funny Pictures - funny pictures - Cheezburger
Alexa ranking for Case study #1: boingboing.net - Information from Alexa Internet
Alexa ranking for Case study #2: Cheezburger.com Site Info
Alexa ranking for HotOrNot{dot}com: hotornot.com - Information from Alexa Internet