Earning Through Blogging

Web Metrics Guru, Marshall Sponder, points us to a Washington post article by Sara Goo that discusses the monetization of blogs and earning money blogging. Of interest is a take by Technorati CEO David Sifry:

“What we’re seeing is still a significant growth in both the number of people who are creating blogs as well as the number of people who make blogs a part of their regular media consumption,” said David L. Sifry, chief executive of Technorati. “There’s a perception that this is some elite group [of bloggers] and there’s no way I could break into it, it’s too late. That’s absolutely untrue.”

Data on the top moneymaking bloggers are difficult to find. According to Sifry, several hundred bloggers earn enough to make it their full-time job. He said about 10,000 bloggers are earning money as a secondary source of income and about 100,000 others, such as authors and speakers, use their blogs as marketing tools to generate income indirectly.

I’m not sure of Goo’s numbers on this, and I’m not sure David Sifry has really delved into the way blogs are being used as a money making device. I think that Sifry’s remarks are a bit off as it relates to those doing it for a full time job. I would say that he may be looking at those numbers purely from an American point of view. I can think of quite a few people writing blogs as their only source of income and doing quite well here in the states, but how about those countries where “making a living” is a very small amount of money?

Those numbers to me really don’t add up in my mind, but of course, math has never been my strong suit. 60 million blogs and only a tiny fraction of the total are making money? Google Adsense probably has 10% of that total signed up and using advertising on their blogs right now. I might guess that Google only sends out about 10,000 checks a month to the bloggers and that may be his number. Since Google only sends checks when users have reached a certain threshold of money earned, it may be many months that bloggers use the system but never see revenue. The other very small fraction are using blogs for marketing tools? This can only really mean one thing in my mind, and that is that Sifry and Technorati are tracking millions of splogs!

Tags: Marshall Sponder, David Sifry, Technorati, Sara Goo, Monetizing Blogs, Blog Revenue, Google Ads, Google, splogs, Blog Marketing