Is There Such a Thing as an Overly Commercialized Blog?

I make no bones about it. I visit a number of different blogs on a daily basis. These blogs all have the same theme; they are all run by one-man shows who have made a living off of the Internet, and blogging. In the names of blogs that I visit on a daily basis, I would include such names as John Chow, Shoemoney and Pro Blogger as blogs that I visit on a daily basis.

I appreciate the hustle of running a blog. I appreciate the fact that these guys are all making HUGE money from their personal blogs. But there comes a point in which I feel that a blog becomes overly commercialized, and two out of these three blogs have crossed the line, in my eyes.

What do I mean by crossing the line? I mean, they are way too monetized. Too many ads, and too many posts in which the main purpose is to blatantly make money.

John Chow is making over $7000 a month from his blog. That's great. However, I feel that he is more focused on the dollar, and not focused enough on providing his users with useful content that will keep them coming back. If you don't grow your user base, you will find that revenues will drop, as your current users will drop off and find new sites, and they will also start to suffer from "ad blindness" and stop clicking on the ads of your site.

Let's look at Chow's blog. First off, there are ads everywhere. That's fine. However, it seems as though over half of the posts are geared towards making John money, whether it is featuring batches of blogs that have linked back to his page, or doing a paid review of a site, or posts that are blatantly done to attract a certain type of web traffic.

I look at John's blog and don't find as much useful content as I used to. That is a shame, and I feel as though John will start to feel the pinch if he doesn't provide more quality content.

Problogger is a fairly informative blog, however I wish that Darren would spend more time on unique, informative articles rather than just posting links to other sites. This is laziness in my opinion. However, Problogger has such a critical mass of users that he will never feel the pinch, in my opinion, and probably has no real incentive to spend more of his time creating unique content. It is just not worth it to him in all likelihood.

The one blog that I feel gets it right is Shoemoney. This blog provides a tremendous amount of useful content, and advertising is kept to a minimum. Shoemoney has stated that he makes over $10k a month from the blog, so this would seem to be the perfect mix of unique content and advertising.

Because of this, I feel that Shoemoney will continue to grow, and continue to make more money, and John Chow in particular will start to notice a drop-off in traffic. Just my opinion of course.