How do bloggers make money?
Hotsauce84
8,450 Posts
I'm talking about the independent ones, not the ones who blog for a larger corporation or something. Advertising? I've noticed that some of these bloggers make a lot of updates throughout the day. And some of them are time sensitive. I can't imagine that they have day jobs or classes that allow the to blog on the clock. (Well, maybe that IS the case considering the amount of posts some of you "hard working" dudes have!)
Comments
you just nailed it. Look at how many people manage to post on the Strut throughout a day yet, supposedly, are either in school or work full-time. You can blog seemingly around the clock yet still be on someone else's clock.
As to how they make money - very few make good $ off of advertising. If you had enough hits where that'd be the case, you're popular enough that someone else would likely buy you out. From my experience, it's hard to make a living as a blogger unless you're working for a larger corporation.
I'm not certain if that "new music cartel" even makes that much, at least not independently. Maybe blogola has evolved very quickly in the last year or so (which is completely possible) but most of what you get isn't cold cash but rather things that elevate traffic and can be converted into tangible capital.
Personally, my blog has been useful from a marketing and storefront p.o.v. I made a little bit of change ($30/month) from Amazon associates and what not, but that's hardly significant bank.
Shit, is that why I'm not getting paid?
Which is to say: ZERO, since Huff Post doesn't pay for most of its blogging content.
Maybe when all the newspapers die, advertisers will redirect more of their budgets to pay for online exposure?
I blog because it's fun to see the traffic grow, maybe from an ego standpoint. If my numbers ever leveled off, or started dipping over time, I'd probably stop. But my one-year anniversary will be in July.
But, as someone who has worked on online video content, and had to discuss different sales options for sponsors, I can tell you that companies are SHOOK about spending real money for online advertising. It feels like everyone has agreed that they'd rather be the last one into the pool if it becomes a success than the first one to drown if it fails.
For the internet to generate more money, we are going to need more net-savvy people to convince the people who hold the purse strings that this is a viable way to spend money on advertising.
Why do you think they're shook? If someone sees an ad in a magazine or on the internet, isn't it all exposure? Just wondering the psychology...
Part of the psychology, as I was told by, "guys in sales," is the recent "In this economy!" which becomes partly, self-preservation, as no ad-buyer wants to make a costly mistake on something, "unproven," or more accurately, non-traditional, and lose their job over it.
And, partly, as the old advertising adage goes, "I know 50% of my ads work, but I don't know which 50%." The people who pay for these ads from companies WANT this to work for them- because traditional media is NOT working. But, they don't know what works. Embedded video? That alone got me to stop going to ESPN.com in favor of anything else with scores. Pop-up banners? There was one on Slate.com this week that didn't have a close tab (F*ck you, Sprint and Slate) and made me leave their site. Pay for content by watching? Salon tried that- and they may still, but I burned out on their content. Anyway, those last three examples are strictly anecdotal, but illustrate the hard time that advertisers are having in trying to determine not just IF they should advertise on the web, but HOW.
http://d27vj430nutdmd.cloudfront.net/4837/13617/13617.pdf
all of this is very true.
there's another problem with online advertising though, which is that the level of "ad blindness" is much higher online than in print and tv. TV has the lowest level of "ad blindness", the problem is getting a targeted audience. Print can be much easier to reach a targeted audience, and of course internet can you give you an almost perfectly targeted audience. But people are most likely to completely ignore online ads. Hell, almost all of my friends and I use adsense in firefox to just block them out completely.