IP Democracy: Blogging Pays $1,000/Year or....$500,000/Year

Two articles today underscore the little-understood money-making potential of blogging. The first, from the Christian Science Monitor, says that most bloggers make nothing from their efforts, a sizeable minority makes $1,000 per year, while a few rare bloggers make “serious money.” (It’s very depressing to me that one of the biggest and earliest bloggers out there, Jeff Jarvis, makes only $1,000 per month for his efforts.)

On the other hand, John Battelle’s Federated Media is stepping into the breach to pump up bloggers’ ad revenues, as this Business Week article attests. FM has signed on some big new advertisers, including Cisco, Nissan and Nike and generated $10 million for its 90 member web sites last year.

Equally depressing to me is the statement that blogs have a tendency to drop out of the FM network when their revenues hit $500,000 per year — at that point, bloggers think it’s better to hire an ad sales person than rely on FM to rope in the sponsors. Based on these articles alone, it looks like blogging will pay only chump change, but, alternatively, if you’re very good, you’ll hit the half mil. dollar mark and grow out of the FM network.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 5, 2007 8:52 AM to IP Democracy