Support Yourself By Blogging? Not Really

From DICE, April 22, 2209...

For refugees from an intellectual and real-time-oriented business - like many aspects of tech, for example - the notion of blogging for profit has natural appeal. An ex-colleague of mine blogs for a living, and a few professional acquaintances in transition have at least toyed with the idea.

How achievable is it? Not very - unless you’re able to get by on $22,000 a year even after putting in enough work to attract what’s considered a large audience for a blogger (100,000 unique visitors every month). That’s what evidence from a widely cited survey indicates. And it’s reinforced by anecdotal evidence from individual bloggers.

The economic potential of blogging is suddenly a hot topic, due in large part to an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by guest columnist Mark Penn (better known as one of the nation’s leading election campaign strategists). Penn cobbled together statistics from disparate surveys to argue that some 450,000 Americans rely on blogging as their main income source - more numerous than computer programmers or firefighters, and almost as numerous as lawyers - and those with substantial readership earn $75,000 on average.

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