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."
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.
being an ink-stained wretch is its own reward/punishment - perhaps you can get a consulting/speaking/teaching gig on the side
Megan,
I think you're just trying to keep others from entering your lucrative profession.
/snark
Some years back I saw an estimate as to the number of people making a regular living from free-lance writing in general. It included book authors, playwrights, free-lance journalists, and so on.
As I recall, the number was shockingly low, something under 10,000 nationwide.
You mean my blogging won't make me instantly and effortlessly rich?
I demand the government give a bailout for bloggers!
The number of professional bloggers alleged is obviously ridiculous, but I would be interested in an article about the much smaller number of actual professional bloggers. Such an article might shed some light on how incestuous the circle of political bloggers is (e.g., how many degrees of separation does each liberal blogger have from Matthew Yglesias?).
Would this include a stay at home mom who gets a few advertising $$ from her mommyblog, but has no other source of income of her own?
I'm very sorry to hear about those meager incomes. You know what you guys need, right?
A union, of course.
Hey Megan, is it ok if we do a bit of thread hijacking and link to another blog, if it's for a common liberal-libertarian cause? I just read this post by Glenn, and it's f-ing hilarious. I wanted to share.
I know you guys don't always see eye to eye (was that a great blogging heads or what?), but I presume you and most people around these parts agree with him on this.
You didn't figure out during the Democratic primaries that Penn is a useless hack who is full of crap?
Well Megan, if you'd do what Glenn Reynolds does, then you'd make a decent living.
Every third post at Instapundit is a paid advertisement masqerading as a blog post, paid for by the likes of Amazon, Popular Mechanics and even the Atlantic.
Blogging for money isn't hard if you're a whore to start with.
I hate to pick nits but a major grammatical error in the first sentence of an article really makes me cringe.
"who's seen it" is a contraction for "who has seen it."
"whose" is possessive as in "whose book is this"
And does movertype guy have ANY proof that Instapundit gets paid for the mentions? Anyone gets paid for referred purchases from Amazon and he must get paid for writing articles for PM, but paid advertising? I think you're jealous.
Amazon and PM are both neat and I'd probably mention them a lot if I had a blog.
There may be one guy with some incredible niche--or moronic employer--making a ton of money with a modestely well-trafficked blog.
Any employer stupid enough to pay $75k to someone to blog for a site that only gets 100,000 unique hits per month is clearly running a business that will not last very long.
@GaltLives
" ... have ANY proof that Instapundit gets paid for the mentions?"
None needed. Glenn will admit to it if you just ask him. He's honest about it, but doesn't disclose it.
WHAT??? BLOGGERS CAN MAKE MONEY?????
Madness I say, madness!