What is a blog post worth compared to a book page ?

Ever wondered how much was worth a blog post compared to a book page ? I did !

So let’s take a simple example. To make a better comparison I will consider a popular blog which makes $10 000 a month (using advertising with banners, text links, reviews, etc.). We will suppose that the blog publishes 3 posts a day. A post is something like 300 characters long. We will ten consider that a post is equivalent to one book page. So a blogger writes a book of 400 pages in about 4 months. So that’s $40 000 earning for a complete “online book”. The problem here is to count the number of readers. Usually with such blog you make something like 4 to 5000 unique visitors a day. Of course a visitor may read only one post whereas overs read all the posts. But this is not an issue for that analysis. So over the 4 months you will have something like 600 000 unique visitors. The term “unique” is not really true here as there are returning users usually over the 4 months.

A book on the topic “get rich online” sells something like $30 and is about 400 pages long. If you consider a book that sells quite well, the book will sell approximatively 25000 copies. The author will really earn something like 10% of the sales amount so that makes $75000. Assuming that the author could write it in 4 months.

Writing a book is not exactly the same work than writing a blog. If you write a novel you need to imagine a real story and create some suspense.

So winning money online with your blog can be a very good source of constant revenue. Moreover this revenue is very likely to increase over the time. Whereas for a book you need to take the risk of never being published. Thus, the 4 months of work could be complete waste. And even if you get published you still need to sell a certain amount of units.

On the other side writing a bestseller could make you earn million of dollars. This doesn’t seem to be easy to achieve with a blog.