Can You Make Money With Blogging?

First this is about personal blogs… the kind that one person or a team can create and edit, not about making a million blogs with remixed content at each blog for keyword saturation purposes.

I’ll reproduce just one exchange in this debate, but the whole article is worth reading!

From Start Up Journal

Alan Meckler writes: Jason, good stuff as usual for one so sharp and original! But look at the number you have in your reply — 500,000 per month (page views) is virtually unattainable for 99.999% of all bloggers.

My blog only gets about 300,000 per month — so with your model I might make enough money per month to buy a candy bar. And I have the advantage of getting promotion through the Internet.com home page as well as many links to other bloggers.

Your concepts are good, but once again only for a selected few.

Jason Calacanis writes: With 300,000 pages in the B2B [business to business] space you could RPM at $15-$50. That’s $4,500 to $15,000 a month, or around $50,000 to $180,000 a year. You make $242,000 a year according to Yahoo Finance — the candy bar gap is closing!

However, you are correct that the majority of folks are not going to make a living from blogs, but that’s because they choose not to try, not because they couldn’t. If folks focus in on a niche and own it there is a good chance they could make half a living from blogging.

The online advertising market is going to grow to $18.9 billion in 2010 according to some company called Jupiter Research I found on Google.

That means we are going to add $1.5 billion a year in advertising to the Internet. That money needs to go somewhere and I think blogs and citizens media could take 10%-20% of that. Right now the homepages of the big three are sold out at very high rates (Yahoo, AOL, and MSN). There is a major inventory problem on the Internet and the reason that Google has done so well is that they are spreading that money out over hundreds of thousands of sites which carry Google AdSense.

The fact is that the “long tail” of sites is largely unmonetized. Over the next five to 10 years, Google AdSense, Weblogs Inc., Yahoo Publisher Network, AOL’s white-labeled version of AdSense, and Microsoft’s “AdSense killer” will enable the monetization of a lot of those smaller sites.

Look at MySpace, they are the number two site on the Internet but they are making $13 million a month. They probably have the lowest RPM in the history of the Internet! That means they have a lot of growth ahead of them. Of course, the fact is they moved instant messaging to the Web (talk about back to the future!), which is largely responsible for their page growth. If you took the number of IMs on AIM and [Yahoo Messenger] and put them on the Web, they would be the number one and two sites on the Internet tomorrow… So, I’m not that impressed, frankly.

In fact, I think based on this email conversation we’re gonna start a repping business for smaller blogs.