The Day Job

There’s a reas­on­ably good report (but watch out for the pop-​​ups) in the Christian Science Monitor about the micro-​​economy created by Google Ad-​​sense. For most people, as you’ll appre­ciate if you’ve ever used the platform, we’re talking very micro. The success stories cited in the report are making a cool $100 a month from their blogs. That’s an even-​​cooler fifty quid here in the UK — the price of a cheap pair of trainers.

And those results are over-​​inflated. The article makes use of a self-​​selected poll of bloggers who all said how much money they made on their blogs. How much more likely are you to elect to take part in such a poll if you consider your blog fin­an­cially suc­cessful, than if you know it’s a miser­able failure?

I liked the overall tone of the report, though, because it’s pretty level-​​headed about your earnings poten­tial as a blogger, unlike that ridicu­lous Business 2.0 ‘Blogging for Dollars’ story with the Michael Arrington cover:

“I’ve gotten so much from giving and sharing my videos for free,” says Mr. Garfield, whose vblog is at SteveGarfield.com. “I’ve made so many friends from all over the world.“

That’s a good attitude, I think we’d all agree. There’s been some other benefits too: Garfield’s also made enough money for some new computer equip­ment and stuff out of his blog, and has found his way into a spot of con­sultancy. I inter­viewed Ashley Norris of Shiny Media last week, whose UK blog network just took £4.5mn in venture funding. If you look at their plans for investing that money, you’ll find that there’s very little about tra­di­tional blogging in there. It’s about video, com­peting with the big boys and R&D.

So what does this and that tell me about blogging for dollars? It can take you places — it’s got me a new day job that I like a whole lot more than the slough of despond that freel­ance journ­alism had become. I’ve talked to plenty of other people whose blogs did the same thing for them. Look at Scoble, for example, his blog got him the life of Reilly at Microsoft. It’s got people like Steve Garfield into con­sultancy. It’s got Shiny to the point where they can start to act like a ‘grown-​​up’ media company (Ashley’s words).

The vastly inflated figures in the Monitor piece shows you what you should do if you want money, though:

• Google Adsense income: $1bn
• Google Adsense payout: $780mn
• Google takes: $220mn
• Average blogger takes: ~$100

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• Updating the blog reports
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