Chow-Chow

If you know anything about blogging for profit, you probably know about John Chow and his website johnchow.com. In the last 18 months, John has taken what began as a personal blog costing him money, to a full-blown business site that now makes over $20,000 a month. Not only that, it also help lay the foundation for his own advertising network TTZMedia, which brings in who knows how much.

I first heard about John Chow via Leo Laporte and his radio show The Tech Guy. Since then his site has been in my Bookmarks. Once, I was an almost religious reader, but now I probably only check back once every day or two and only briefly.

What caused this change? Well, I’ll tell you.

For his credit, John has always been straight forward that his site is a money-making venture, and helped who knows how many people make money from a hobby. However over the past few months the character of the site has changed. When Leo talked about John’s website he noted that, yes, he had about 15 different advertisers on his site but they were tastefully done and not that intrusive. Today, the front page of johnchow.com now looks like one giant ad and has the feeling of one of those early morning get rich quick infomercials.

Am I the only one who feels this way? Maybe not. John himself admits that his total number of page views in November 2007 is down slightly compared to November 2006. But his monthly increased 10-fold because of the changes I noted above.

On one hand I applaud John for building a blog that makes over $200,000 a year, something I could only dream of, but on the other I question if John may end-up destroying his creation as tries to pump all he can out of it.