Blog-A-Holics Make Money
Blogging is still like the early days of the ‘Net–mostly a good ole boys club. That much is obvious from the just-released State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which found that 66 percent of bloggers worldwide are male.
But some less obvious findings in this report from blog search engine Technorati interest me more. After all, the Internet population eventually lost its male dominance. So, too, will the blogging universe gain more women writers over time.
What surprised me about this survey of 1,209 bloggers is how much money some are making. The top 10 percent of bloggers are earning an average of $19,000 a year from their blogs, while the top one percent earn over $200,000 annually.
That doesn’t mean most blogs throw off much revenue, though. The median annual revenue for all U.S. bloggers with ads on their blogs is only $200, meaning half earn less. The higher, $19,000 average is skewed by top-tier bloggers who earn the really big bucks.
Slightly more than half of all blogs have advertising now, and most use self-serve tools from Google, Yahoo and others that automate the display of ads based on the text of their posts. Only 19 percent negotiate directly with advertisers, and six percent have a sales force.
Technorati, which monitors activity in millions of blogs, released the fifth and final chapter of its blogging report today. Overall, it shows blog growth slowing, and posting activity declining.
Technorati counted 900 million posts per day this year, down from some 1.5 million daily posts in March of last year.
Half the bloggers said they focus on personal lifestyle issues, while 46 percent write about technology, 35 percent about politics and 42 percent about news of some kind. Most blogs cover multiple topics, and many bloggers maintain multiple blogs.
Technorati has tracked 133 million blogs since 2002, but most appear to fall into disuse. In the last three months, people posted to a total of 7.4 million blogs, Technorati reported.
That’s still a lot of active blogs, and their authors spend plenty of time posting. Half of all bloggers spend more than five hours a week blogging, while one in four spends more than ten hours weekly. Some 43 percent of the 100 most popular blogs tracked by Technorati posted ten times a day or more.
People are reading their work, too. Half of all bloggers surveyed reported that their blogs were attracting more than 1,000 visitors monthly.