It has come to my attention, through my own observations, that John Chow has been lying to us in regards to his monthly blog income. While this is not to say that he does not make very good money from his blog, I don’t think that his reporting is entirely accurate and it could definitely be a bit more straightforward and honest.

There are three areas where his reporting of his blog income could use a bit of work. First of all, when he refers to the income his blog generated in a previous month, he refers to his blog revenue rather than profit. As most people know, profit equals revenue minus expenses so to be a bit more straightforward and not “pad the numbers” he should refer to his blogs profit rather than revenue when reporting his numbers.

The second issue that I would like to address is that of affiliate commissions. According to his March income report, he made $7,729.37 from this income source in the month of March. While this is a respectable amount, I am not entirely certain one should consider it as a portion of the blog income.

I understand that without the blog, this revenue stream would not exist, however, this revenue stream is not entirely dependent on the blog’s existence. By their very nature, the majority of these affiliate earnings would continue even if John decided to take down his blog tomorrow.

While we are on the topic of affiliate earnings, I think it would be nice if he would breakdown this revenue stream in a way similar to the breakdown of the total blog income. Wouldn’t it be nice to see how much affiliate income came from the different sources such as Kontera, BlueFur, Text Link Ads, etc? He could then report this separately from his blog income. He could even spawn it off into a separate company under the John Chow L.L.C. and call it John Chow Referrals, John Chow the Affiliate, John Chow Affiliates or something like that.

The third issue is the one where he is really lying to his readers. In his monthly breakdown, he categorizes the income by source. This is nice of him to do and helps his readers to see where the money is coming from. This also makes it more understandable how he can make such large amounts of money from his site. However, regular readers of his site will notice that almost all of the ReviewMe reviews are written by Michael Kwan. While I haven’t asked him directly, I would almost be willing to bet money that he does not do this for free.

I don’t know how much he gets for each review that he does, but there is no mention of this expense in the monthly income report. Revenue from ReviewMe accounted for $5,000 in March for John Chow dot Com. I don’t know for sure if this is before or after ReviewMe takes their 50% cut but would imagine that it is after.

However, the only expense listed for March is $520.45 for advertising. If the $5,000 is after ReviewMe takes their 50%, the total paid to ReviewMe for reviews would be $10,000. Dividing $10,000 by $500 per review would show that there were 20 reviews for the month. If Kwan gets $50 per review of the $250 that ReviewMe distributes to John, that would equal another $1,000 of expenses for the month.

Using my suggestions above, the guess of $50 per review for Kwan, and the figures that Chow provided here is a recalculation of the income for John Chow dot Com from the month of March:

Revenue:
Private Ad Sales: $15,230.00
ReviewMe: $5,000.00
Text Link Ads: $2,031.90
Kontera: $1,000
TTZ Media: $384.24
FeedBurner: $45.73
Subscription: $20.00
Total Revenue: $23,711.87

Expenses:
Contextual Advertising: $520.45
Michael Kwan for reviews: $1,000.00
Total Expenses: $1,520.45

Profit:
$23,711.87 - $1,520.45 = $22,191.42

While $22,191.42 is a very respectable amount of money and I commend John for being able to make that much off of his blog on a monthly basis, it is quite a bit less than the $31,441,24 that he reported and will likely use to refer back to this post in the future.