I did a lot of digging around in the numbers around blogging for my book, so I’m on alert when I read a piece like Mark Penn’s look at pro blogging in the Wall Street Journal, which is getting lots of attention this morning. A little skepticism is definitely in order.
Here’s the nub of hard numbers in Penn’s piece:
The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s.
Where do these numbers come from?
“20 million bloggers” links to a 2008 report from Emarketer that costs $695 if you actually want to know how they got their numbers (I confess I haven’t made the investment).
“1.7 million profiting” links to a promotional page for BlogWorld Expo that cites no source at all for its data.
“452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income” is drawn from a Mediabistro rewrite of numbers from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere reports. Technorati’s are the longest-running and most valuable, and consistent, series of blogging studies over time, but like any study’s numbers, they can be easily misrepresented: here, Penn relies on them for the datum that bloggers who reach 100,000 uniques a month can earn $75K a year. But if you read the source, you find this:
The average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.
In other words, the $75K average is skewed by a handful of outlier successes, but the great majority of bloggers who get 100,000 uniques/month earn more like $22,000. Here, the median is far more relevant than the average. Penn, of all people, knows this.
Later on, Penn’s piece cites other sources, including a Pew study and this iLibrarian post which references a 2008 study by an outfit called BIGResearch. The BIGResearch study particularly flummoxed me as I was researching my book, and in email correspondence with a company representative I got to the root of the oddness of their numbers: Their study defined “blogger” as, basically, anyone who writes or reads a blog. That’s one way to muddy the waters!
The methodology of Penn’s piece seems to be: gather as many numbers as you can and don’t worry about the fact that they are from many different sources at different times using different methodologies and even differing definitions of what it means to “be a blogger” — just toss them all together and start drawing conclusions. Those conclusions, in turn, seem to be based on a misapprehension that bloggers are by definition opinion writers. Many are, to be sure; but many others — particularly in the “pro blog” world Penn focuses on — concentrate on becoming expert sources in a particular area, or informational services, or link reviews.
My suggestion to Penn (who — full disclosure — I briefly worked for, decades ago, during my college years, when he was starting his company): You should commission a real study of blogging, using real sampling techniques, and share the results with the world. No one has done this yet that I’m aware of. You know how to do it! And we’d get a lot better information than this crazy-quilt pastiche of mix-‘n’-match stats.
UPDATE: Penn has posted an addition to his column that goes into more detail about the numbers. “I was surprised at how few studies there are on this,” he writes, “and I believe there definitely should be more. So perhaps in the future I will do some original research, but for this piece we took the best we could find and referenced every number so people would know where they came from.”
Post Revisions:
- April 21, 2009 @ 13:51:04 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- April 21, 2009 @ 09:34:10 by Scott Rosenberg
- April 21, 2009 @ 09:21:47 by Scott Rosenberg
Penn’s piece is entirely insane. I’ve been writing a blog that makes advertising revenue for several years, and I know precisely how my revenue has risen and fallen, based both on unique visitors, the states of the industry I write about (wireless data), and Google’s AdSense success.
I also know quite a few other bloggers who run high-traffic sites, or sites that at least have 100,000 unique visitors per month.
Monetizing remains difficult except for the highest-traffic sites which themselves don’t necessarily bring in fortunes even with millions of monthly page views.
The notion that nearly half a million people make their living from blogging is prima facie laughable. I would ask Penn to find 10 people who aren’t running top 1,000 sites who make a living off their blog.
Not going to give full name or a link, but I know one way to make a living from a blog: live somewhere where cost of living is low and still make U.S. dollars. Worked for me for about a year, and I’m definitely not top-1,000.
Hurray for debunking numbers! Strong work, and definitely resonates with my experience.
What ever this is, the blogging really cashes in. One can easily utilize his interest by making a blog on it, and attracting some people from same niche and at this step common sense might help to increase earning and earning the living, altogether.
It’s actually all in the way you market – you actually can make a good amount from your blog, but not by running google ads.
It’s link bait with the agenda to discredit bloggers, basically a cry for help, newspaper writers are losing their jobs.
Also see Lenhart, A. and S. Fox (2006) Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers. Pew Internet & American Life Project. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp
They are a nonprofit research organization with about as good (and transparent) methods as you are likely to find.
They estimated as of spring 06, 8% of adult American internet users were bloggers (c. 12m). defined as saying yes to “do you ever create or work on your own online journal or blog”.
“Only 15% say earning money is a reason they blog and only 8% of bloggers report actual income. These bloggers are mostly older than age 50.” So only at most c. 1m bloggers at that time made any money at all.
In an updated survey as of Dec 2008, just 3% of US Internet users had updated their blogs on the day asked, which suggests a rather lower level of blogging that is at all committed.
I would love to see some better numbers on pro blogging but based on the numbers I just outlined I would guesstimate only 500k making any amount of money at all, most of it chump change and perhaps 10,000 making enough for it to be their ‘day job’.
Oh , total horseshit. According to Google Analytics, my blog is getting 67,000+ uniques a month, which is at least within striking distance of the 100k he claims generates $22k in revenue. I estimate monthly ad revenue (plus transaction revenue from purchasers of games we link to via an affiliate program) at around $40/month. (Not $40k, $40, as in two Jacksons; admittedly, I blog on an obscure topic.) Hosting at $100/month (which maybe I could reduce, but I’m old school and like having control over my own server), plus I actually pay a pittance to some of my contributors… It’s a hobby, it’s not a source of positive income, let alone a living.