Posted on September 11, 2008 - by Mike Panic | Visited 584 times, 2 so far today

John Chow dot com 3 launches, I yawn

One of the popular web celebrities who blog about blogging and making money from blogging is John Chow.  His personal site was launched for no other real reason other than to see how much money he could make from blogging about, well blogging and making money.  He’s a very successful tech blogger and media network owner, so he knows the ins and outs, but a year or two ago, blogging about blogging really started to take off, so why not jump on board, share some tips and tricks and profit.  He’s done well, real well, nearly $30,000 a month well and has a cult like following.

I was a daily reader of his site up until he switched to version 2.0 maybe a year ago.  At that point, it was clear that the focus was on ad placement and started to make reading the content that much harder.  John’s primary readers are bloggers and creative writers who are looking for ways to turn a profit on their own sites, they want information, not blatant advertising.  The overall layout was clean though with good graphics, but I stopped reading daily.

Today, Version 3 launched and John has moved the index of the site to be similar to one of the other super popular bloggers, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net with respects to being more of a magazine style with snippets of current articles, more ads and some static information.  Inside the site is supposed need less scrolling to read the articles and be cleaned up even more; I can agree to disagree with that.  He did finally do away with having exotic cars in his header, but that only appears to be because others ripped the idea and so he could fit more advertiser space in.  On my 1280×1034 screen I count 13 ads plus the top half of two more ads and one more ad promoting his e-book.  It’s a bit much.  The footer takes on the trends of other larger Web 2.0 sites with what must be close to 500 pixels high worth of information, sadly there is no button to take you back to the top of the page

With more than 30,000 RSS subscribers, 2,000 more following on Twitter people listen to what he says, but I think more is being emphasized on how it looks instead of better content.  John is still posting up photos of food and other random things and shares his insight on how to run a blog for money, but getting to the content for me isn’t worth the trouble anymore.

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