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The Spectacle Blog

Wall Street Journal Lies About Blogging

By Robert Stacy McCain on 4.21.09 @ 11:13AM

If this is the kind of basic economic data provided by the nation's leading business newspaper, no wonder the market tanked:

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as "spokesbloggers" -- paid by advertisers to blog about products.

Ri-iiight. But I'm merely an unofficial "spokesblogger" for Corona Beer, which may explain why the moolah's not rolling in.

View all comments (5) | Leave a comment

Joe Carter| 4.21.09 @ 11:28AM

Which part do you disagree with?

I would say that a blogger needs at least 100K visits a month to earn a living purely from blogging.

And you can get paid $75-200 (or more) per post—if you're willing to be a shamless shill. Even on my small blog I've been offered $150 from Reviewme.com to "review" products.

MattSwartz| 4.21.09 @ 11:39AM

Joe,

Even so, I can't imagine a better way to drive away traffic than to "review" random products. Something like that would have to be done both rarely and subtly, or else everyone would stop visiting, which would render it unprofitable again.

Joe Carter| 4.21.09 @ 12:33PM

MattSwartz,

I completely agree, though I think the practice goes on a lot more than we might think.

I also think that RSM is thinking about political blogs, whereas the WSJ is probably referring to non-political blogs. I doubt anyone can make real money in political blogging. But if you're, say, a "shoe blogger" (e.g., www.shoeblogs.com) you can probably get some decent kickbacks from shilling products.

nohype| 4.22.09 @ 4:43PM

The original source for the numbers is http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/blogging-for-profit/

"Among active bloggers that we surveyed, 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."

The huge difference between median and average says that there are a few very high numbers out there. It also says that if you are getting “only” 100,000 unique visitors per month, you will be getting a lot less than $22,000 since that is the median of all those getting 100000 or more uniques per month. Half of them are getting less than that amount.

Because the author of the Wall Street Journal article seems not to understand much about statistics, that became:
"It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year."