For refugees from an intellectual and real-time-oriented business – like many aspects of tech, for example – the notion of blogging for profit has natural appeal. An ex-colleague of mine blogs for a living, and a few professional acquaintances in transition have at least toyed with the idea.
How achievable is it? Not very – unless you’re able to get by on $22,000 a year even after putting in enough work to attract what’s considered a large audience for a blogger (100,000 unique visitors every month). That’s what evidence from a widely cited survey indicates. And it’s reinforced by anecdotal evidence from individual bloggers.
The economic potential of blogging is suddenly a hot topic, due in large part to an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by guest columnist Mark Penn (better known as one of the nation’s leading election campaign strategists). Penn cobbled together statistics from disparate surveys to argue that some 450,000 Americans rely on blogging as their main income source – more numerous than computer programmers or firefighters, and almost as numerous as lawyers – and those with substantial readership earn $75,000 on average.
Figures Don’t Lie, But….
Other authorities – who apparently have greater respect for the numbers and sources they quote – call Penn’s conclusions suspect (to be polite).
“This article is ABSURD!,” one well-known financial journalist and blogger e-mailed me in reply. “My blog gets more than 100k unique visitors and was earning $200/year before we removed the ads (no point in having them).” He goes on to cite a friend whose site also draws heavy traffic, is highly targeted to a well-defined group… and brings in about $6,000 a year in ad revenue.
“No one is living off this money!” my contact concludes. “The notion that half a million people make anything near subsistence on blogging is total crap. I’m used to bad statistics, but this is really beyond the pale.”
(For a rigorous dissection of Penn’s methods, see Waldo Jaquith’s post in the Virginia Quarterly Review.)
– Jon Jacobs
Tags: blogging
