Thanks to this WSJ article that says:
The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”
Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around — but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial. At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.
The barriers to entry couldn’t be lower. Most bloggers for hire pay $80 to get started, do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars. But a subgroup of these bloggers are the true professionals who work at corporations, serve as highly paid blogging consultants or write for sites with substantial traffic.
Sounds good, right?
Well, that started a backlash from the hardworking but narrow-minded, basically dumb bloggers who work their asses off, but don’t know how to make $ from it! Dumb people like Megan McArdle who says:
The estimates of professional bloggers seem wildly inflated–if you help update the company blog once a week as part of your marketing internship, you are not a paid professional blogger. And the numbers they themselves link to tell a much different tale from the article: most blogs bring in pitiful amounts of money for their owners.
This seems to follow the model of Mark Penn’s book: find some bizarre number and mindlessly extrapolate it to an absurd conclusion. Yet I still don’t understand why common sense did not keep him from publishing this article. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that almost all of us know many more computer programmers than professional bloggers–this is true of me even though I am a professional blogger, as are half my friends. Or he might have called some professional bloggers, who would have (sorrowfully) told him that no one is making $75K a year off of 100,000 pageviews a month, that being about how much traffic I pulled when I was starting up in 2002. Or, hell, he might have noticed that in the very BLS survey so nicely transformed into a table for his article, there is not entry for “blogger”–but that if you add up every writer, reporter, editor, PR person, technical writer, or “media and communications worker, other”, there are only 499,890. Since Penn says that there are 452,000 paid bloggers, this implies that 9 out of every 10 communications workers are professional bloggers.
There may be one guy with some incredible niche–or moronic employer–making a ton of money with a modestely well-trafficked blog. But the plural of “anecdote” is not data.
Believe me, I’d love to think that blogging is a surefire path to riches and job security–but I’m afraid all most people get out of their blogs is the satisfaction of a job well done.
This all reminds me of when the surprisingly narrow-minded Dan Lyons posted his tirade on how despite all his education and effort, he was still just a poor dumb blogger.
Again, I’ll speak on behalf of the 1% of bloggers who do make $–this is my best month ever as I’m closing in on $80,000+ for April–it all comes down to trying new tactics, products–not just ads dum dums–and most importantly, not taking anything too seriously because they’re always new news, readers and ways to profit.
I’m reminded of the few people who claim my trading strategy, making my 30 hours worth of content on my instructional DVDs totally worthless and full of lies (I’m not talented enough to lie for 30 hours), is a fraud because they think it’s impossible to short sell stocks under $5 or $3…no truer words than the following have ever been spoken:
JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO IGNORANT/INCOMPETENT TO PROFIT FROM ANY STRATEGY, BE IT BLOGGING OR TRADING, DOESN’T MEAN OTHERS WHO ARE SMARTER & MORE DETERMINED THAN YOU AREN’T ABSOLUTELY CRUSHING IT!
….aka it sucks to be mediocre, but that’s the vast majority of the world…stop the pity party, stop whining and work your butts off until you make something of yourselves!