Blogging for money isn't as hard as some jobs, but it's usually profitless
(Image: WRI)
Like the vast majority of the 100 million bloggers in the world, I earn less than a dollar a day from my own blogs.
That’s an average figure. Some days I earn more, many less. But it currently averages out to about a dollar a day. Blogging for money is a terrible idea.
Blogging is about as profitable as subsistence farming
Half the world’s poor live on a dollar a day or less, and they make their money in more brutal and uncomfortable ways than those blogging for money.
Bloggers have to worry about:
- Inconsistent traffic
- Winner-takes-all competition
- Unreliable monetization
The world’s poorest workers have to worry about:
- Physical exhaustion
- Hand-to-mouth employment
- Physical violence
- Deadly working conditions.
Many would be delighted to earn a dollar sitting at a Mac in their lunch hour, moaning about the blogosphere. So let’s be clear: I’m in no way equating bloggers’ hardship with the suffering of the truly poor.
What interests me is why millions of well-off people would blog to earn as little as a labourer in a rice paddy?
Blogging for money is hard work
Many people blog to share their thoughts, not to earn money. This post isn’t about them. I’m talking about those hundreds of thousands of us who read Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, who hope to make money from our blogs.
We write decent content, position and promote it, and still find blogging for money sucks. Why do we do it? Given the minimum wage in the US, UK, and Europe, blogging is about the worse way someone could try to make some extra money. Yet it’s perhaps the most discussed and attempted.
Most half-decent bloggers will have jobs paying 10-100 times more per hour than what their blog pays. If they’re blogging for money, why don’t they just work overtime or get a side job? Why are they content to be paid the same as a Somalian sharecropper?
