Is There Money in Blogging?

By Mark Evans
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

So why do you blog? For fame? Vanity? Or, perhaps, for fortune? The New York Times put the spotlight on the money yesterday with a story looking at how advertising and market dollars - estimated at $50 million to $100 million a year according to Forrester Research - is flowing to blogs. Sure, there are individual bloggers making a good living from advertising but those are few and far between. But for most people, the only revenue flowing their way is an occasional AdSense cheque from Google. I think most of the serious money - if you can call $50 million to $100 million “serious” given it’s a drop in the advertising bucket - is being snapped up by blogging firms such as Weblogs Inc. that can offer advertisers an easy way to reach a large number of different consumers. This approach is opposed to the individual blogger who, if they have enough traffic and an advertising-friendly site, can be tossed a bone across the transom once in awhile. John Battelle’s Federated Media initiative could be a sign of things to come because it provides bloggers with the back-end infrastructure to do business (a.k.a. attract advertising) while giving advertisers one point of contact to access a semi-loose blog network. Federated Media’s members include Boing Boing, 43 Folders and Om Malik’s GigaOm.

We Say: The advertising community is just starting to get its head around getting online (5% of advertising dollars vs. 30% of consumer’s media time is spent on the Web.) so it may be optimistic to expect to aggressively charge into the blogosphere so quickly. Would be nice, though.

More more thoughts about blog-vertising and my lack of success, click here.