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I saw this rant on 5xmom. She complains of decreasing blog income… actually she earns more than $500 and that is already a lot of money for me. I understand her frustrations as I am also feeling the crunch with paid writing jobs becoming scarce and the remuneration getting lesser.
Adsense earnings have dropped for many bloggers too. Although I don’t use Adsense here (because of my low trafffic), I have read a lot of blog posts commenting that their clicks are earning less. Not surprising considering Google’s share price has tumbled to less than 50% of its peak. Google now has to source for more advertising money as well as cut costs to achieve good quarterly report.
To sustain a blog, it is not easy, what with lots of research, forum/social networks/blog hopping, and editing to do. It is almost like having a full time job except that you are not answerable to anyone but yourself.
If bloggers cannot at least cover the basic cost like domain and web hosting, then the blogosphere is as good as dead.
Ford Motor Co. surprised Wall Street with a $100 million profit in the first quarter as strong results from Europe and South America helped offset the impact of a slumping U.S. economy that cut car and truck sales in its main market.
The company also said Thursday its latest round of early retirement and buyout offers netted 4,200 hourly workers, fewer than Ford had targeted.
Ford says it earned 5 cents per share compared to a loss of 15 cents a share in the same period last year.
Excluding special items, the company said it made $525 million after taxes, or 20 cents per share. That beat Wall Street’s expectations. The profit came despite a $45 million pretax loss in Ford’s core North American automotive market.
It was Ford’s first profitable quarter since the second quarter of 2007 when it made $750 million. Ford reported a full-year loss of $2.7 billion last year, and it cautioned that the rest of this year will be tough. Ford also lowered its industrywide U.S. vehicle sales forecast for the full year.
Google’s fabulous quarter earnings eased slowdown fears. Fans enjoyed the biggest one-day Google stock rise — up $89.72, or 20%, to $539.26 — in the past two years as the Net search giant blew past earnings targets by avoiding a big drop in U.S. paid click traffic during the first quarter of 2008.
Wall Street had been a little pessimistic going into the earnings report Thursday, after ComScore (SCOR) surveys showed a third straight month of negligible advertising traffic growth related to domestic searches. The reports helped confirm suspicions that the drag of decreased consumer spending was starting to spread beyond retail and housing to the tech sector.
But the fears of a revenue slump at Google were overestimated as the company saw strong international paid click sales, and the effects of higher prices. Google reported 20% growth in overall paid click revenue over year-ago levels, which was down from the 30% pace in the prior quarter, but well above the 1.8% U.S. rate ComScore reported for March. ComScore flagged the U.S. slowdown but did not capture the bigger picture, namely Google’s expansion overseas, which accounted for 51% of total sales, up from 47% a year ago.
Analysts who had braced for a slowdown going into the earnings report quickly turned bullish after Google’s earnings were released.
One element of Google’s big performance may reflect well on rival Yahoo. Though Google gained market share in the first quarter at Yahoo’s expense, the health of the sector seems to be intact. This should give Yahoo some added sway in its standoff with Microsoft over the $42 billion proposed merger.
When Citigroup and Merrill Lynch each fessed up to nearly $10 billion in losses last quarter, investors believed the companies had finally scrubbed their books clean. Those hopes were a bit premature.
“The fourth quarter felt like the kitchen sink [quarter],” said Jaime Peters, a bank stock analyst at Morningstar. “We are going to find out it necessarily wasn’t.”
Citi and Merrill are among a group of major financial firms due to deliver ugly results for the first quarter in the coming week. The first quarter was marked by the near collapse of Bear Stearns, continued credit market woes and increased signs that the U.S. economy is indeed in a recession.
Overall, analysts anticipate that the banks’ results won’t be quite as bad as they were when they announced grim fourth-quarter results three months ago. But banks still find themselves squeezed by many of the same problems that plagued them at the end of 2007.
With businesses in a multitude of sectors, such as health care, finance, energy, consumer electronics, industry and media, many consider General Electric to be a barometer for the health of the U.S. economy.
GE has typically been a model of consistency, rarely missing - or beating - estimates. Only once since 2006 has GE failed to deliver earnings that exactly met First Call’s forecast. That was in second quarter of 2007, when it beat the earnings per share forecast by a penny.
Thus, investors were surprised when they missed first-quarter earnings, deflating hopes that the conglomerate could rise above a continued economic slowdown.
Even with strong presence in overseas overseas and a 22% year-over-year gain in global revenue, they were not immune to the U.S. credit crisis.
GE lowered their full-year earnings guidance, and its second-quarter forecast fell short of expectations. GE reported lower net income compared to the first quarter of 2007. Earnings are at 44 cents per share, down from 48 cents per share a year earlier and well below 51-cent-a-share as projected by analysts.
