How much financial potential does a good niche sports blog have?

I have a blog dedicated to a particular conference in football - in regards to design, and raw appeal it out does every 'competitor' out there (as for content - obviously sites like ESPN will break a story before I will), but I have custom stories and write-ups that pull rave reviews from readers. This is all passion of mine.



Now I'm curious - for those with professional blogging experience, what type of figures have you seen for people with a unique sports blog, with steady heavy traffic and readers?



Just a ball park figure - I'd obviously like to pull enough to make this a living, but I don't want to aim TOO high if it's not really realistic.

I think it's great that you're doing something you love, kudos to you. I don't have any financial estimates for you but the biggest potential revenue streams are going to originate from the amount of traffic you collect. You can either sell ad space on your site for many of the Ad Exchange Networks such as Right Media or you can sell you site outright to a bigger fish, i.e., Rivals.com to Yahoo! Rivals started out small too with a niche, high school recruiting and sold for a hefty amount of money because the info they had was top notch and they were recognized as the leader in their field. The quickest buck for you though is going to be ad space inventory. You might want to check out the Right Media Exchange and look at the qualifications for being a publisher on their network. As you get bigger you'll also want to investigate Comscore which is a third party service that measures web traffic and visitor engagement. Having a favorable Comscore rating is a good bargaining chip when selling ad space.