Are Geoblogs Commercially Funded?

Glenn noted in a comment:

Actually, any blog that is serving up Google ads (ie. pretty much 98% of the blogs out there) is commercially funded.

I had some extra time over the holidays and went to find out if that 98% number is true in the geoblogs. I visited every blog from Planet Geospatial and divided them between those that had Google Ads, those with more traditional graphic banner ads, those that had both and those that had none. I successfully connected to 83 blogs; 5 were not online during my research. The results:

Google Text Ads   12 (14%)
Traditional Ads       4 (  5%)
Both                 3 (  4%)
None               64 (77%)

Total               83 (total does not add to 100% due to rounding)

Now, others might have classified things differently or been more savvy than I about how “traditional” ads were served (perhaps from Microsoft, Yahoo or some other service). I do not want to suggest this was a scientific, random or complete survey.

Some examples of each category:

Google Ads: Rusty Planet, Spatial Ireland
Traditional Ads: Windows Live Local / Virtual Earth, All Points Blog
Both: Very Spatial, The Map Room
None: Random Notes (Jason Birch), Datum Shift