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September 20, 2004

Bloggers don't do it for the money

No kidding...

Read this in my Schwab Internet Daily email alert last week:

Few of the writers of the estimated 3.8 million Web logs on the Internet are making money. Sreenath Sreenivasan, professor of
new media at Columbia University, said that while bloggers' visibility has increased this summer, their incomes have not. "There's a very tiny percentage of people who are making anywhere close to a living from blogs," he said, according to an Associated Press report. Henry Copeland, whose Blogads.com places advertising on a network of Web logs, said some of his publishers make $120,000 a year from ads, but he did not identify them for the news service. "Dozens" he said make $1,000 a month. But Andrew Sullivan, whose politically oriented Web log is among the most popular, said freelance writing and speaking engagements pay his bills. "I couldn't live off the blog alone, and I see no prospect of that happening in the near future," he said.

So why do we blog? I find it interesting to think about. I took to blogging mostly because I'm the type of person that would, given ample time, likely keep a paper journal of some sort. I have at various times in my life - my journal from high school and college eventually migrated from paper form to electronic. As computers became more and more a part of daily life, I looked for opportunities to "journal" with the computer. I never went so far as to use "diary software" or some such thing - I kept a large running text file.

Back in 1999, friends Derek Scruggs and Tim Thiessen separately had turned me on to Blogger. This seemed like the way to go, though not for totally private journaling. In an obvious way "blogging" is a very public diary. Because it is public, we don't necessarily write about all the intimate and personal things which a private journal would keep - but instead we write about things in between.

Bloggers are simply writers, looking for an opportunity to muse - present their thoughts on minutiae in their lives. It fills a desire for communicating - fitting somewhere in between writing a sentence and an essay. Not all your thoughts can be novels, in fact very few of them can. At best, one day we may in fact see published works based upon a collection of blog entries. Then, maybe one can imagine being "paid" ultimately for blogging.

How cool would that be?

Posted by gcrgcr at September 20, 2004 10:44 AM

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