Blogging Pays, For Some
Media Guerrilla points to a San Francisco Chronicle article, "For some, blogging pays". The story outlines some of the challenges that eager bloggers face as they attempt to kindle their early flames with advertising dollars. As this snippet describes:
The percentage of blogs that have ads is still quite low, but it's likely to grow now that companies like Google are making it easy for bloggers and advertisers to connect.
To lure ads, bloggers say a site should be about a specific product or subject. Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, says people who want to sell ads on their blogs should plan to work on them hours a day for at least 18 months to develop a following.
"This doesn't happen overnight. You have to build a voice, a relationship," he says.
Some people fear advertising will corrupt blogging and encourage bloggers to write for money, not passion.
"The presence of advertising clearly pollutes the simplicity of the relationship between the writer and the reader. But I think it would be really simplistic and indefensible to argue this is a unique problem in the blogging space," says Tim Bray, a blogger whose day job is director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems.
Blogging truly is, and will continue to be, a labor of love for its proprieters. The article notes that the average blogger utilizing ads averages only 20 - 50 dollars a month. I've vented some of the trials associated with the blogging process just a couple of weeks ago in my "Blatigue" post.
I am often most puzzled by the rather negative assignments made to the process of generating revenue from blogging. It's unfortunate, at best, that some people take offense to the intersection of commerce and creativity. Realistically, the forces and expenses spent in the process of being creative and generating content, both syndicated and original, must be replenished from somewhere. Hopefully, we'll be able to look beyond the ads and see the value we gain from the underlying resource.