Blog Insider: So, How Do People Make Money From Blogging? [$2 Challenge]
by Latoya Peterson
Blog Insider is a short series designed to illuminate the challenges and opportunities around working in new and legacy media. It’s open reading to all, but will be particularly useful for those trying to make a living in the media world. – LDP
Short answer: They don’t.
Often, when I am traveling or speaking, I get asked a lot of questions about Racialicious. The most common is, “so the blog’s your full time job?” (Answer: nope, not even close.)
The second most common is, “How much money do you make from ads?” (Answer: zero – no ads on site.)
That’s when people tend to get a bit confused. How do these people that I see with big bylines, or published, or featured places, still complain about being so broke?
Darren Rouse, of Problogger fame, does a semi-frequent survey that asks people how much they make from blogging. Here is the 2007 survey:
Most folks don’t make much at all.
For most, that’s fine – a lot of people blog as an outlet. Blogging to express yourself, to stoke your creative juices, to finally finish a novel (or in my case, to finally finish an academic paper) are all great uses of time. However, some people eventually want to make the transition between blogging for fun or for themselves and making a living at it.
The most common way to monetize your blog or site is through ads. I’ll talk a bit more about the limitations of this model in another post, but think of it this way: ads require a lot of traffic and growth to make it worthwhile. If you a running a blog that is outside of popular norms, is superniche, or is controversial, ad revenue can be helpful, but won’t be enough to live on. Especially if you have a group blog. Outside of straight monetization through ads, there is another way – your blog as your platform for exposure.
That is how Carmen and I worked it. As Racialicious grew, we were exposed to more people, and able to identify ways to make some money on the side. For Carmen, the increased exposure from Racialicious led to media appearances, which led to speaking engagements, consulting work, and her experiments with monetizing the blog experience, most notably with Addicted to Race Premium and The Racialicious Experience.
For me, Racialicious was a platform to achieve what I didn’t think was possible – to become a working writer. (If there’s interest in how to become a freelancer, I can write about that as well.) The first few editors to work with me knew me from Racialicious – from there things just grew and grew and grew, to the point where I stopped being a contractor for a while, and just freelanced. I also speak, but not as frequently as Carmen did.
Renina sent me an article about the Awl, noting that one of the biggest takeaways in the piece was that the site’s mantra wasn’t to make money at all costs, but just to make enough to eat. I noticed one of their best known posts was a screed on freelancing by Richard Morgan. In his piece, “Seven Years As a Freelance Writer, or How to Make Alphabet Soup” he lays out the harsh realities of the business:
Editors like to talk about how much they need freelancers and how much they envy our freedom and our work ethic and our Rolodex. Whenever a friend loses his staff job at a magazine or newspaper, his ensuing panic reminds me that they put all their eggs in one basket and that I am cushioned because I have my eggs spread across so many baskets (which is a different kind of panic). Freelancing has great rewards, but trajectory is not really one of them. You do not go from being a freelance writer to a freelance editor to a freelance deputy managing editor. Essentially, I’m doing the same thing I was doing in 2003. The market for my vaudevillian sales of wonder tonic can dry up at any moment. An editor leaves. A magazine folds. And poof! Gone. [...]
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