Judging from the descriptions of the unknowns on the list, and his own title tag 'Make Money Online,' I think this list is really geared to a, well, 'you can make money online doing nothing' crowd. This is the author's bio blurb: I am 20 years old and am living the Internet Lifestyle which means I make money while I sleep and get to do what I want, when I want!
Half the entries are there because they did things like 'monetized his Problogger website in two new ways this year, by adding a paid forum and an eBook which has influenced a lot of other bloggers to follow suit.'
'Timothy is doing things the way they should be, you don’t have to just monetize your website with banner adverts, and you want to diversify your income so it comes in multiple streams. Timothy has earned over $150,000 in one month from his blog and makes it look so easy, check out one of his monthly blogging reports to see how he does it!'
'Another person I met at the Underground in 2009, James has really set a new standard for affiliate blogging. If you took James’s site and put it along side some of the top blogs in our list and looked at the traffic, James would only have a small fraction of their traffic but would most likely be earning more! Check out James’s website and learn how to create a affiliate funnel to bring in a lot more money from your blog!'
The author probably gets affiliate kickbacks as well. On the other hand though, what else is he going to blog about?
What baffles me however is how there is supposedly so much money in blogging about making money through blogging. During the summer I attempted to blog some more, and put in a bunch of content that resulted in large traffic spikes of 20-30k visitors for a couple days.
Amazingly, I received something on the order of 50 cents which seems like a complete opposite of people claiming to make a few dollars on a random blog with 100 visitors a day.
So now I've decided that everyone is either grossly exaggerating or I am a complete failure at monetizing.
At first I thought this list was bogus because of all the tech names that were left off.
But when I really thought about it I realized people like Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, and the rest look big because they have the whole self-referential circlejerk happening. But if they said "Do this because it's great" I don't know of anyone who would then go and do that based on their recommendation.
"In the US" doesn't help much at all. I'm a blogger and I've not been influenced by anyone on the list. This may be because my main focus is on teaching and learning, not on monetizing my blog.
I appreciate that you were interested in what people thought about it, but please consider what you're doing: knowingly adding something of no value to the mix. That's noise, not signal.
Half the entries are there because they did things like 'monetized his Problogger website in two new ways this year, by adding a paid forum and an eBook which has influenced a lot of other bloggers to follow suit.'
'Timothy is doing things the way they should be, you don’t have to just monetize your website with banner adverts, and you want to diversify your income so it comes in multiple streams. Timothy has earned over $150,000 in one month from his blog and makes it look so easy, check out one of his monthly blogging reports to see how he does it!'
'Another person I met at the Underground in 2009, James has really set a new standard for affiliate blogging. If you took James’s site and put it along side some of the top blogs in our list and looked at the traffic, James would only have a small fraction of their traffic but would most likely be earning more! Check out James’s website and learn how to create a affiliate funnel to bring in a lot more money from your blog!'