John Gru­ber (Dar­ing Fire­ball) and Jim Coudal (The Deck Ad Net­work & Coudal.com) gave a great talk at South by South­west 2010 titled “Online Adver­tis­ing: Los­ing the Race to the Bot­tom” in which they spoke about what meth­ods they have used to gen­er­ate income from their online efforts.

Down­load or lis­ten to the file here.

John is a full time blog­ger who writes pri­mar­ily about Apple and related tech­no­log­i­cal top­ics. He’s tried a vari­ety of adver­tis­ing and mem­ber­ship meth­ods and finally set­tled on two meth­ods of income for his blog:

1) A spon­sored RSS feed with a men­tion at the begin­ning and end of a week, cur­rently priced at $5,000/week:

2) And a sin­gle Deck Net­work ad on the side of the site:

Both meth­ods, which John talks about in the audio linked above, allow John to main­tain com­plete con­trol over what is on his web­site while still main­tain­ing a bit of dis­tance from the adver­tis­ers who use The Deck Net­work. Every­thing is writ­ten in John’s own voice and reg­u­lar read­ers of his blog will know that he cer­tainly doesn’t hold back his opin­ions, even if there’s an Adobe adver­tise­ment sit­ting in the ad block.

To me the great thing about both John Gru­ber & Jim Coudal’s points in the talk is that while num­bers do mat­ter and they do help you estab­lish a base­line — writ­ing or cre­at­ing great con­tent is what will win out in the end. Let the adver­tis­ers worry about the num­bers, sell throughs and click-ons and impres­sions — cre­ate the con­tent you want to cre­ate and let the rest of it sort itself out.