Hubs versus Blogs

I still consider myself a newcomer to hubbing.  Since I started at HubPages on June 30, it has really been a great opportunity to reexamine my experience with blogging.  I now believe that some content is best published through a hub while other content may fit better in a blog.

I have been blogging actively since 2004 and in September, my personal blog attracted over 20,000 unique visitors.  My blog has been growing steadily and if a recent report from Technorati is to believed, I should be on my way to achieving some significant income from blogging.  The truth be told, I am on my way to approaching $50/year in AdSense revenue.  Considering the amount of time that it takes to maintain my blog and the amount of time it takes to write my blogs, that revenue is significantly lower than $.10/hour.

It’s very true that I can probably, greatly increase this revenue by learning more about Adsense, figuring out the best ad placements, placing in more cross references, etc. but the truth is, I don’t have the time.  To keep the new blog entries coming, to respond to comments, and to manage the layout time takes up a lot of time.

A blog is a big responsibility.  If I don’t publish any content for a month, then my overall blog traffic may go down.  There’s no other content coming to my blog besides my posts so there’s always pressure on me to keep the content coming.  With a lot of effort, I can usually publish four blog entries a month.

Now, compare that to a very active web site such as HubPages.  Here, I can publish an article on any topic that I am interested in.  To date, I’ve created 18 hubs.

HubPages also has the advantage of leveraging the YieldBuild technology.  This is a technology that focuses on statistical analysis and algorithms to ensure the best ad revenue yield.  You can see the details here if you are interested.

Because the ad placement is done automatically for me, I don’t have to learn so much about adsense.  In fact, I don’t have to worry about layout, ad size, color selection, or any of the other choices that adsense offers.  This means that if I am ever fortunate enough to have the same traffic on my hubs that I have on my blogs, the money would be significantly better.

I was recently talking with Maddie Ruud, the Community Manager of HubPages, about her most successful hub: The Truth about Wu-Yi Tea.  Recently, in a single day, she made over $100 in Adsense from this one hub.  For me, that’s amazing considering that the hub was written over a year ago.  If you go to Google and type “Wu-Yi Tea”, her hub is the first entry on the first page.  Paul Edmondson, CEO of HubPages and YieldBuild has written a great hub on the topic of “Evergreen Content”.

Now, this story is not typical of hubs.  Indeed, all my hubs combined make less than $100 per month but it raises what I consider to be a very interesting point.  A hub if it is well written and if it covers a popular search topic, has the possibility to be monetized in a way that does not require too much overhead and upkeep.  Of course, it also doesn’t hurt if you are a gifted writer such as Maddie.  Paul Edmondon has just published a hub on tips for using HubPages to make some extra income.

To date, my hubs have gotten a total of 2400 page views.  Over three months, that’s roughly 800 page views per month.  My blog when I first started it did better.  My second month, I got 1200 page views and it’s been going up each month from there.  Of course, I should point out that when I started my blog in 2004, it was one of the few blogs in its topic area.  It was one of the first math blogs on the internet.  In contrast, the hubs that I have written have been about quite ordinary things such as movie reviews, a survey of ancient history, and one hub on the history of math.

Now, a hub by its nature is about a certain topic.  It may be advice, an opinion, a poem, or a story but it always has a focus.  A blog in contrast can be an opportunity to share news, to post family photos, or to write very personal stuff that does not fit neatly into a topic.

So, for me, a hub is really the most interesting way to publish a single article and a great way to attempt to “catch” a topic area that people are searching for on Google.  A blog is a great way to post personal content.

That’s been my experience.  What has your experience been?