Thanks to Drew B for drawing my attention to a fantastic article about blogging in New York magazine. The gist of it is that while blogs can earn money for writers, it’s not very likely. There are a number of issues, but the key is the number of inbound links. A large site with a staff can produce more material than a small, part-time hobby site. Also, they have more readers in the first place. This means a lot of people will read and link to them from their own sites, increasing the large site’s Technorati and Google rankings. The system is thus self-perpetuating and the top 1–2 blogs in every category completely dwarf their smaller competitors. To make things worse, even the larger sites pay peanuts to their writers. Maybe I shouldn’t have booked that holiday in the Maldives after all…
Blogs to Riches by Clive Thompson
“It’ll be more like the mainstream media, really,†[Elizabeth Spiers] adds. “Blogging is increasingly becoming a survival of the fittest—and that all boils down to who has the best content. The blogs that are going to stand out are the ones who break news and have credibility.†Plus, it can’t hurt that Wall Street scuttlebutt is one of the last truly huge unfilled niches in the Manhattan blogosphere. “This is a business, and we’ll build business infrastructure from the get-go.†The age of the blog moguls is here. For Pete Rojas, blogging paid off handsomely. Last fall, AOL bought Weblogs, Inc., which includes his blog Engadget, for $25 million. “I didn’t intend to become a millionaire,†says Rojas, “but I wound up there anyway.â€
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