July 19th, 2006
3 Million Bloggers Looking to Make Money
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results from a blogger survey today, which detailed the reasons why bloggers blog. The report focuses on some notion of storytelling vs. journalism (whatever), but what jumped out at me was that 7% of bloggers said that making money is a major reason why they blog.
(You can get the full report here.)
This was a relatively small sample survey of U.S. bloggers, but for the sake of some back of the envelope calculations let’s assume that this is roughly true for all of the 48.8 million blogs currently being tracked by Technorati. That’s more than 3 million bloggers looking to make money (only about a third of them in English).
Talk about a long tail.
No wonder Google makes billions of dollars from AdSense — and no wonder there are so many new ad networks looking to get a piece of that action.
For my part, making money is not the principal reason why I started Publishing 2.0, but it seems silly not to make money if there are viable ways to do so that don’t compromise other goals, which is one reason why I’ve done a lot of experimenting with ads on the site (also to learn by doing).
I just answered a BlogBurst survey that is trying to gauge the importance of making money — I wrote back and told them that damn straight it’s important. Here’s what I have a problem with:
Where’s my name? More importantly, where’s my share of the revenue for the display ads?
With 3 million money-hungry bloggers, I hope for BlogBurst’s sake that this is in the works.
Revenue sharing — whether with bloggers, people generating content in other forms, people making a purchase, or people just giving their attention in general — is the new paradigm, and companies in the new media space are well advised to “democratize” their business models.
Topics: Blogging | Blogs | Business Models | Media Economics | Publishing 2.0
Powered by 
Design by 
Scott,
Are you saying that SFGate / BlogBurst stole your content? I take it you signed up with BlogBurst by choice. If you’re not happy with them why not just quit?
Michael,
Sorry I didn’t make that clear — I did sign up for BlogBurst to see what it was all about, so I did absolutely agree to their terms. But it wasn’t until I saw my content like this that I started to feel like they had stolen it — even though I agreed to the terms. And yes I likely will quit if they don’t change the terms. My point is that models that don’t share the wealth don’t seem particularly viable.
[…] Some interesting blogger stats today are discussed by Scott Karp. […]
I hear ya. I was recently asked to join NewsTex but I declined b/c their revenue share model seemed rather weak. They keep 70% and the 30% is then split between all the publishers according to the number of posts contributed. I’ve also turned down “offers” to join aggregation sites which run ads but don’t share the revenue with the members. FOr the life of me I can’t figure out why so many bloggers sign up for those kind of sites. IMHO, all you’ll end up doing is penalizing your own site’s search engine ranking b/c your content is duplicated on another site(s) with (likely) greater PageRank than yours.
scott,
you’ve latched onto a dirty secret of the blogosphere - lots of people looking for content so they can attract advertising but not willing to share it with the content producers. the problem for most bloggers, however, is they don’t have the time or resources to pursue advertising themselves so they settle for exposure using any means possible. it’s the price of fame and glory!
Infinite Spectrum believes that all content is marketable and that everyone deserves a peice of the pie, not just the hosting companies or publishers.
As the Traditional Media folks begin to enter the New Media race, they are just trying to reinvent their old model and not the new one that is emerging. We are working on being able to provide content creators, be it blogs, photos, artwork, music, or online videos, services to match them up with advertisers and traditional media companies trying to get a foot hold in the digital world.
[…] Paying the top amateurs: - The Jason Calacanis is paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or “$1,000 a month for doing what you’re already doing.”). Another interesting link on bloggage for money draws some interesting conclusions on the incentive(s) for blogging and from the Pew Blogger Survey. Related Posts from the Past: […]
“Revenue sharing  whether with bloggers, people generating content in other forms, people making a purchase, or people just giving their attention in general  is the new paradigm, and companies in the new media space are well advised to “democratize†their business models. ”
To the above comment by you, Scott, all I have to say is…Amen and Amen!
In fairness to Blogburst, they do say on their site that they will offer a revenue sharing plan with bloggers once they are out of beta, although they don’t specify the percentages they plan on offering.
Just out or curiosity, and this question is both for you and others who have been tempted to join services like NewsTex mentioned above, what would you consider a fair share of the advertising revenues from companies like this?
Joseph,
I told the folks at BlogBurst that I would stay in the network to see what they come up with. I don’t fault the terms of their beta or their need to experiment to find the right model — it just really struck me when I saw my full text content running next to ads.
As to the right revenue share, I don’t think that there is a one-size-fits-all formula. I think it needs to be proportional to performance metrics, whether traffic, click-throughs, or conversions (although I think conversions is the future).
Publishing 2.0 / 3 Million Bloggers Looking to Make Money The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results from a blogger survey today, which detailed the reasons why bloggers blog. The report focuses on some notion of storytelling vs. journalism (whatever), but what jumped out at me was that 7%
[…] Blogging for Fame, Fortune and Fun by Mark Evans on Wed 19 Jul 2006 07:03 PM EDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos So why do you blog? Why do you spend so much time writing away to make - ifyou’re lucky - a $1 a day? According to the latest Pew Internet survey, 77% of people blog to express themselves creatively rather than for fame or fortune, while 7% of people blog to mostly make money. Rather than focus on the 77% who blog simply because they can, I’m curious about the 7% looking to put some cash in their jeans. These people must be very optimistic or naive because the blogosphere is a beast with plenty of content chasing far too few advertising dollars. Sure, you can make a few bucks a day using Google AdSense if you’re really lucky or if you’re really, really lucky and quite famous, John Battelle might ask you to join his Federated Media empire. But for the vast, vast majority (99.99%+), there’s little or no money in blogging. So why do it? Well, if you like to write and feel the need to express an opinion, rant, provide insight, build your brand, learn or just talk about the weather, the barriers are almost non-existent. So blog away. It doesn’t mean you’ll be famous or make a fortune (let alone a $1 a day) but as Sheryl Crow sang “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad”. For more on Pew and blogging for cash, check out Publishing 2.0 and Reuters. […]
the barriers are almost non-existent. So blog away. It doesn’t mean you’ll be famous or make a fortune (let alone a $1 a day) but as Sheryl Crow sang “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad”. For more on Pew and blogging for cash, check out Publishing 2.0 and Reuters. [IMG]
[…] The results from this blogger survey from Pew are great, but they looked better over a year ago when BlogKits released them first As Scott points out (Publishing2.com), 7% of bloggers said that making money was a major reason why they blog. More on that below. […]
Those stats looked great, over a year ago when we published them from our own survey of over 1,000 responses…
Just saying. The pew can write one heck of a press release.
http://www.blogkits.com/blog/?p=34
is to make money. Only 15% of bloggers report this as a reason for their blog-keeping, and just 7% call making money a major reason. Bloggers over age 30 are more likely than younger bloggers to give making money as a reason to blog. Publishing2.com calculates that this means there are about 3 million people blogging for money. Some of these 3 million may be very vulnerable to quitting should a significant drop in pay-per-click revenues be on the way thanks to high click fraud rates. However, it won’t result
Hi Scott,
I think you missed a few key points of the survey–that 44% of bloggers have published before, and that bloggers *might* be, not are, looking to make money. There’s nothing conclusive to say that they want to make a living from blogging…still mostly a pipe-dream except for the 8% of A-list bloggers (most of whom don’t make a living from their blogs either.)
Further, have you ever taken a good look at the numbers of blogs thare chock full of ad sense? Many are splogs making money off of other people’s content. I’ve had my content scraped and added to these splogs (and, oddly, I think they’re using blogburst to help with this) and there’s no way to stop it. The page screenshot you’re showing is quite similar to a splog–even though it’s from a legit outlet like SF Gate, the effect is still the same. They’re making revenue off your content.
And that simply highlights another problem with making money from blogging–the blogging community has a particular gift-economy zeitgeist running thru it. Gift someone with your content and, eventually, the gift will come back. Eventually. On a wing and a prayer.
Blogging’s not really about making money. Blogs can be used to leverage means of making money. Blogs can be entry points into journalism or other writing professions (that’s what it’s been for me) but Blogging is not a means to an economic end, and most bloggers know this.
Tish,
Thanks for the great observations.
I agree that most bloggers don’t want to (nor would they if they did) make a living at blogging. But making a living and make some money are two separate things, and Google has made a fortune off of the latter. And you’re right, off of splogs, etc., and that’s a big problem for Google.
But I think the “gift-economy” is not an either/or. I blog for those long term returns. But why not get some cash in the short term? And that’s where there is a huge opportunity for ad networks and the like.
[…] Publishing 2.0 reports on a Pew Internet research report. Scott puts it as 3 million bloggers looking to make money, which is fair enough, that’s what the report says in passing. But as the chart shows, it really shows that most bloggers do it for other reasons. 3 Million Bloggers Looking to Make Money […]
[…] Scott Karp picks up on the latest Pew study that finds that 7% of bloggers list making money as their major reason for blogging. A further 8% list making money as a minor reason. […]
@Joseph,
I think the revenue share would at least have to be 50/50 for me to consider joining anything like NewsTex. 30/70 in their favor is ridiculous. The reverse of that makes more sense to me.
*gasps* Only 3 million bloggers blog to make money!? Just kidding.
Well, BlogBurst have now changed their contribs agreement so it’s a little more agreeable BUT is still a no brainer for a publisher. Free content from whomever they like whenever they like. Hmmm??
“the new agreement still makes no mention of compensation, one of the major sticking points brought out in the original discussion. Newman admits that he doesn’t have an answer to that quetion at this time, that it is something they are accepting proposals on and working toward, but is hopeful that an upcoming click-thru tracking system will convince bloggers of the promotional value of BlogBurst. ”
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=289
Putting my ScooptWords hat on for a minute, isn’t this just like those crappy cheap websites offering ‘increased exposure’ for your prose? I mean, if your words are good enough to appear in SFGate, they are damned well good enough to pay for. Those - frankly ginormous ads - are earning someone hard cash. Alas not Scott Karp
I believe it’s called being buttfucked in your neck of the woods.
Scott…
yeah, your right about making *some* money off blogging vs. making a living from blogging….two separate things. I’d certainly like to make a little extra off of my blogging, as I don’t like the sploggers making money off of it.
T.
Music story What you think about this offer..? I think the music lovers can’t resist it. May be in the future we may get even more..! Money making bloggers Now, the bloggers are looking for money..! I wish we can all make money from blogging and do not have to go to work at all..! Excel tutorial I found this tutorial very useful for me. Apple mail icons Please find the apple mail icons
[…] One blog I read regularly Publishing 2.0 by Scott Karp has a good post about being picked up and not being credited. He is well worth reading. […]
CrispAds the blog advertising network is up for sale.
Thanks to Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 for finding the key point in a new Pew Internet report on blogging: 7% of bloggers want to make money with their blogs. Fancy that eh? With around 16,000 active members, and a focus on the commercial side of blogging, I’d like to think we have a small but
s some more posts that caught my eye from the past couple of weeks: Cybercafe Experiments provides a tutorial on how bloggers can use the Lightbox script to ’snazzy image loading effects’ on your blog with Lightbox JS and Zoomr. Scott Karp picks up on the latest Pew study that finds that 7% of bloggers list making money as their major reason for blogging. A further 8% list making money as a minor reason. If you’re looking for a web based way to get a screen cap of a website you might enjoy
[…] http://publishing2.com/2006/07/19/3-million-bloggers-looking-to-make-money/ […]
I’ll be honest by saying that blogging helps me to make money. But not through advertising models. I know many bloggers who enhance their careers, their market stature, get invites to speak at conferences, are quoted by MSM, are asked to work on interesting projects, and other things that can lead to money down the road.
Yes, I would still blog if those benefits didn’t come my way. Like many others, I like sharing ideas around. But it is a fact that through my blog I have gotten paid speaking gigs, I have gotten consulting contracts and I have gotten a book deal. Does that count as “making money from blogging” - in my view it does. If I wasn’t blogging, my ideas wouldn’t be out there for the world to see and fewer people would want to hire me.
For my business, advertising doesn’t make sense - I’m not into blogging to make a dime via Google AdSense on a post here and there. I am into blogging to share ideas with people, to have some fun, and to interact with smart people. And an added benefit is that maybe someone might hire me for an interesting project.
The exposure that Newstex gives me delivers my blog to a much wider audience. Newstex delivers into corporations and financial firms through partnerships with news distributors like LexisNexis. I want that added exposure. I post once and many more people see my thoughts. For me that’s a good thing. Heck, I’d happily sign on to other blog networks for no royalty - I want the exposure. I want more people to read my stuff. For me and many other bloggers, distribution deals with companies like Newstex and others are great to get more eyeballs for free. No it won’t make you rich via royalties. But it can make your blog more important.
Full Disclosure: I am on the Newstex Board of Advisors.
[…] Jonathan at Plagiarism Today writes a long feature about ScooptWords. Good stuff and well worth a read. Unfortunately, like many Wordpress blogs of late, and for some reason I can’t fathom when I post a comment to the site, it doesn’t show up. So I’ll post my comment here. I’ve also emailed it to Jonathan,Excellent overview Jonathan, cheers. Just a few additions/clarifications.The oft talked about blog button is already broaching sales, but it is actually a very, very small part of what we’re about. It’s the most passive sales method we currently have.In the near future we will package the most commercial posts and present them in an easy to buy fashion. Editors will be able to sign up for a tailored email newsletter and/or RSS feed or visit an aggregated website. Buying content is as simple clicking a payment button in a feed, an email, on a website, or indeed the blog button on the originating blog.How do we choose the ‘most commercial posts’? Well, as you mention, we all have a journalistic background. We’re not just some tech start up looking to make cash from bloggers. Some of us have written books, worked as editors or staff writers and freelances, so we have an idea of what sells and where it sells. I still work as a journalist myself. We’re not saying we’re experts, but we’re not that clueless either :)Also, we strongly believe that an editorial gatekeeper is key to the success of ScooptWords, or any blog based content selling service for that matter. We’ve had some great feedback from editors on our plans. From editors at publications with a 2 million circulation to wee specialist outfits with print runs in the thousands. Our job is to make the best, relevant, niche content available to these editors in an easily digestible form that’s a snap for them to buy. As I mentioned, all of that’s coming, just give us some time :)You’re bang on about rates, nothing is fixed in stone. We’ll be reassessing every aspect of ScooptWords within 6 months. The blogger/ScooptWords cut is high on the list to chat about.As for the copyright protection we offer. It’s interesting that many bloggers signed up to BlogBurst, seemingly without realising the copyright grab that was going on and for no money. I believe BB have changed this slightly now. This made us very starkly aware that many bloggers didn’t seem to have a clue about copyright. I mean I’m a blogger too and I’m very protective of my content - I’ve dealt head on with spambloggers and gotten results. Funnily enough, BlogBurst approached me to sign up for their service :)However, there’s no way I’m giving my content away, least of all to a company that’s making cash out of it and offering zilch in return bar ‘exposure’. Unfortunately, agreements like that are absolute nobrainers for newspapers. They get to choose whatever blog content they want and they get it for free and, worse, they plaster that content with advertising. Did you see how Scott Karp’s post on SFGate appeared in a BlogBurst feed:http://publishing2.com/2006/07/19/3-million-bloggers-looking-to-make-money/Now tell me if that was your content and you saw no financial gain from that how would you feel? Be honest now. […]
Neowing（ãƒÂオ・ウィング）[IMG] [IMG クãƒÂãƒÂコヤマトã®ブックサービス][IMG] クãƒÂãƒÂコヤマトã®ブックサービス[IMG] [IMG] [IMG]MusicDoor [IMG ] HMV Japan 　[IMG] [IMG ãƒÂナーボタン白][IMG] boople（ブープル）[IMG]
Original post: 3 Million Bloggers Looking to Make Money by at Google Blog Search: money
Paying the top amateurs: - The Jason Calacanis is paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or “$1,000 a month for doing what you’re already doing.â€). Another link on bloggage for money draws some interesting conclusions on the incentive(s) for blogging and from the Pew Blogger Survey. (1)
I just started this site, I am giving money just to spread the word about lnk’d!
began their widget crackdown by forcing an upgrade and stopping outlinking from Flash widgets. More of this to come. Randy Morin bewails attempts to lock him in: ‘Give me a widget that I can use anywhere. Or don’t give me a widget at all.’ Pew report 3 million bloggers looking to earn money. Is that all? Tim Post starts the Flying Seeds widget blog: ‘Javascript, Flash, and HTML badges & widgets are the flying seeds of the internet’. Blogger
Many bloggers start up blogs with the intention of building it up so that the blogs can be their possible side income besides their main day job. Come on, it’s getting harder to make decent money from traditional way nowadays therefore online is the way to go but I still think 3 million bloggers may not be true. A single blogger can own multiple blogs.
The top reason, ‘to express yourself creatively’, applies to me because I have always been an introverted person and through blogging, I can express what i feel and how i can relate more to the people around me. I am glad to start blogging but earning an income from it seems quite far-fetched now, lol. Thanks for this great blog of yours, I think it is a very authoritative blog around as I am awed by the wide range of topic around here.
[…] blog I read regularly Publishing 2.0 by Scott Karp has a good post about being picked up and not being credited. He is well worth […]