Making Big Money With Education Blogs and Websites

This week, as occasionally in the past, the PEN NewsBlast put out the call for donations from readers. This got me wondering about how – if at all – education blogs and sites "make" money (by which I mean help defray the costs of maintaining them).

With the help of Eric Grodsky, here’s a partial rundown on what’s out there:

Joanne Jacobs: links to Amazon, PayPal donation button
Number 2 Pencil: request for reader donations
Edwize.org: sponsored by the UFT
Carnival of Education: BlogAds (ad placement service)
DA Daily: ads for conferences, AV companies, website management
EducationNews: a few ads
Eduwonk: no advertising, org. funded by foundations
Education Week: ads for schools, foundations, and publishing companies*
ECS E-Clips: sponsored by Pearson Education (publisher)
Stateline.org: funded by the Pew Research Center
This Week In Education: Google AdSense

*Education Week is the only education site that I know of that charges for its content. However, there are several newsletters like the School Improvement Industry Weekly, The Title I Monitor, and Eduventures, that are subscription-only.

There are other approaches being tried: Various efforts like Pajamas by bloggers to band together and generate revenue are in the works, but most of them focus on high-viewership political blogs. Hired bloggers (Wonkette, Defamer, Chicagoist, etc.) are generally thought to make $30,000 or so a year for their hard work.

I have little sense of how much money anyone is making off of these deals. (I, for instance, have made something like 57 cents from AdSense over the past six months.) Many of the sites run out of larger organizations are funded indirectly through operational budgets. Most bloggers have day jobs. And to be sure, no one's got sponsorship from Coca-Cola or General Motors. Yet.