The Business of Blogging

by Sarah Clark
sarah.clark@careertrainingdirectory.com
Career Training Directory Columnist

Can blogs be profitable? One journalist at Wired magazine explores the idea of whether blogging can become a serious business that garners big advertising dollars.

Wired reporter Adam L. Penenburg did some digging to find out whether blogs can bring in advertising revenue. He looked at well-known blog publishers such as Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs; Nick Denton, creator of Gawker Media; and David Hauslaib, the mastermind behind Jossip and Queerty.

What Penenburg found is that pay among bloggers varies widely. Some earn nothing (big surprise) while others reportedly pull in as much as $10,000 a month. Now these aren’t the earnings of the publishers themselves, the Dentons and Calcacanises of the blog world. Rather, this is the pay of those who actually write and edit blogs.

The Business of Blogging

Penenburg suggests that there might be more to the business of blogging than some successful bloggers would let on or that those in the high-brow publishing establishment would like to admit. Blog owners like Denton play down the profit potential of blogs. And traditional publishers snub many bloggers, a majority of whom have no content expertise or formal editorial experience. Weblogs, Inc., for example, encourages anyone with an interest in writing to apply to write for one of their 90 blogs. You won’t find that sort of recruitment strategy at Vanity Fair.

Sources of Revenue: Advertising

Getting back to the original point, it appears that the potential for making money through blogs is there, at least for now. Adam pointed out that Calcacanis expected to take in $1 million in advertising revenues.

If you’re interested in starting a blogging business, you might want to look at how entrepreneurs like Calcacanis, Denton, and others have established their blogs. A degree in ebusiness or ecommerce could help you get the fundamentals of running a business, and then you can just speed away on a high-speed Internet connection to learn about the blogs out there. It only takes one advertiser to start making money.

Sources:

Wired

About the Author

Sarah Clark is a freelance writer who specializes in career development.