Last week, the blog search engine Technorati released its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report with the slightly menacing promise to "deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind.
"Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.
With this kind of cash sloshing around, one wonders: What does it take to live the dream—to write what I know, and then watch the money flow?
From the perspective of someone who doesn't blog, blogging seems attractive. Bloggers such as Jason Kottke ($5,300/month) and the Fug girls ($6,240/month) pursue what naturally interests them without many constraints on length or style. While those two are genuine stars of the blogging world, there are plenty of smaller, personal blogs that bring in decent change with the Amazon Associates program (you receive a referral fee if someone buys a book, CD, etc. via a link from your blog) and search ads from Google. (The big G analyzes your site and places relevant ads; you get paid if people click on them.) Google-ad profiteering is an entire universe in and of itself—one blogger by the name of Shoemoney became famous (well, Digg-famous) when he posted a picture of himself with a check from Google for $132,994.97 for one month of clicks.
Blogs with decent traffic and a voice are also getting snapped up by blog-ad networks, which in turn package them as niche audiences to advertisers. On Blogads, advertisers can choose the "Blogs for Dudes!" hive or the "Jewish Republican Channel." Federated Media groups blogs into subjects such as "Parenting" and "News 2.0"; there is also a boutique network for blogs that don't want to cover themselves with ads called The Deck. These networks present blogs as "grassroots intellectual economy" and describe their audiences as loyal, engaged, and likely to see ads as not just ads, but useful bits of information. This may be a comfort to squeamish indie bloggers since it hints that putting ads on your site is not selling out but helping out.
While monetizing your blog may be easier than ever, all of this comes with an ever-present hammer: the need to drive traffic. This month, the writer/blogger/productivity thinker Merlin Mann opened a window onto his angst with an anniversary post. Mann is best-known as the creator of the Hipster PDA (a modified Moleskine notebook) and his Inbox Zero talk (turn your e-mail into actions). In a post titled "Four Years," Mann sketches out how his site, 43 Folders, grew from a personal dumping ground for his "mental sausage" into a full-featured destination for productivity nerds and life-hackers. In 2005, he experienced a key transition:
At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, "very." But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, these guys actually like blogging and love to post and post and post.
Article Courtesy : http://www.slate.com/id/2201325/
"Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.
With this kind of cash sloshing around, one wonders: What does it take to live the dream—to write what I know, and then watch the money flow?
From the perspective of someone who doesn't blog, blogging seems attractive. Bloggers such as Jason Kottke ($5,300/month) and the Fug girls ($6,240/month) pursue what naturally interests them without many constraints on length or style. While those two are genuine stars of the blogging world, there are plenty of smaller, personal blogs that bring in decent change with the Amazon Associates program (you receive a referral fee if someone buys a book, CD, etc. via a link from your blog) and search ads from Google. (The big G analyzes your site and places relevant ads; you get paid if people click on them.) Google-ad profiteering is an entire universe in and of itself—one blogger by the name of Shoemoney became famous (well, Digg-famous) when he posted a picture of himself with a check from Google for $132,994.97 for one month of clicks.
Blogs with decent traffic and a voice are also getting snapped up by blog-ad networks, which in turn package them as niche audiences to advertisers. On Blogads, advertisers can choose the "Blogs for Dudes!" hive or the "Jewish Republican Channel." Federated Media groups blogs into subjects such as "Parenting" and "News 2.0"; there is also a boutique network for blogs that don't want to cover themselves with ads called The Deck. These networks present blogs as "grassroots intellectual economy" and describe their audiences as loyal, engaged, and likely to see ads as not just ads, but useful bits of information. This may be a comfort to squeamish indie bloggers since it hints that putting ads on your site is not selling out but helping out.
While monetizing your blog may be easier than ever, all of this comes with an ever-present hammer: the need to drive traffic. This month, the writer/blogger/productivity thinker Merlin Mann opened a window onto his angst with an anniversary post. Mann is best-known as the creator of the Hipster PDA (a modified Moleskine notebook) and his Inbox Zero talk (turn your e-mail into actions). In a post titled "Four Years," Mann sketches out how his site, 43 Folders, grew from a personal dumping ground for his "mental sausage" into a full-featured destination for productivity nerds and life-hackers. In 2005, he experienced a key transition:
At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, "very." But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, these guys actually like blogging and love to post and post and post.
Article Courtesy : http://www.slate.com/id/2201325/
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