How to Make Money Writing an Economics Blog

As I wrote a while ago, I signed up for Google Adsense, and they manage the ads you see on the page. (Proceeds to the Utah Food Bank.)

Adsense pays you based on some function of page views and clicks, and this blog makes a few cents a day, on average. Adsense doesn't send you a check until you accrue $10, and I figured it would take years to hit that hurdle.

But then the new iPhones came out.

I was doing some game theory with the EMBAs at the time, and so I wrote a short blog item describing the developer/user coordination game. The post is nothing terribly deep or insightful; just the basic economics of platform competition.

I think the blog traffic on that one post was bigger than the traffic for all my other posts combined. This blog was making about 50 cents a month, on average, from ads. In June, I made more than $6, and that pushed me up over the $10 mark. I'll be sending some funds to the UFB as soon I get a check from Google.

I'm not saying this to try to boast about how insightful I am. As I said, the iPhone blog post is basic network economics that I learned from Garth Saloner (recently appointed as Stanford GSB dean) way back in 1991.

Rather, I'm saying it to point out how interested people are in the iPhone.

I have an iPhone and I like it, but I don't really see where the fascination is coming from.

The strategy and economics of the iPhone are a bit more interesting than, say, the economics of soybeans. But there are lots of goods and services with interesting economics. I think, for example, that the economics of higher ed are richer, more interesting, and more important than the economics of the iPhone.

But I should just be happy that there is something that draws interest to economics blogs. Probably business professors should drop all examples that don't involve iPhones --- we'd do a better job of holding our students' interest!

Just as an experiment, I'm going to put the word "iPhone" in each of my next three posts, just to see what that does to traffic. I promise to report back.