Blogs: Does anybody make a living doing this?

I ask this because I really don't know. I'm sure some people do make money, although I suspect most people who are bloggers don't make money and maybe don't even have the goal of making money.

I know a lot of people have blogs. I'm not talking about somebody who blogs but is paid by traditional media. I'm talking about people who start a blog and make - to throw out a figure - at least $30,000 a year through their own efforts. I'm talking about people who make what would be a fair wage for a relatively inexperienced journalist - and I say $30K because that would include benefits which employers would pay. Somebody told me to look at deadspin, and I saw graphic asking to tip the writer. I thought deadspin was supposed to be a big blog and, to my old eyes, it looked like passing the hat.

Thoughts/Examples

 

By tip your editor, I think they mean they are looking for tips or leads for juicy stories...

Deadspin has a couple of big banners right there on their site, three of them are above the fold. Since they are using doubleclick and tacoda as their ad servers, I have to assume that they are moving a significant quantity and are working with reputable advertisers that pay decent money. They say on their site that they 1.75 million page views per month in January, 2005 (which seems awfully low, especially compared with their Alexa and Google rankings), and are asking for around 42$ CPM per 1,000 page views (which is astronomic).

Comparing their alexa ranking (21 months after they said they do 1.75 million PV's) with that of my own site, I would say that these days they are doing around 6-7 million page views per month. I highly doubt they are making 42$ CPM on 7 million page views, that would be almost 30,000$ per MONTH, but it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that they are making between 7-12 grand. That is completely reasonable money for a popular website like thiers.

Deadspin is owned by Gawker, though, which is about as close to a brand name in the blogosphere as you will get. They supposedly pull in over 2 million dollars a year between their 15 blogs.

 

and here's the money shot...

my company doesn't seem to care too much about newspapers anymore and still had $54.8 million in profit last month among its 18 properties

 

I guess the natural followup question to that would be--what are the operating expenses of that organization, and how many people are getting a piece of that pie?

 

Hoops said profit, that's after operating expenses.

$2 million isn't much for gross revenue. An alt-weekly in a city of 100,000 population will pull in about that much. And probably have fewer employees than Gawker Media.

 

Regarding Deadspin, I know Will Leetch and his wife live in what looks to be a pretty nice place in New York. Now, they're both published authors, so that's paying the rent and then some, but you imagine that Deadspin is more for Will than just a hobby. With his page hits, you would think he makes some decent money there. Just saying.

 

More info on Gawker's finances: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker_Media

 

Seems to me like last presedential election the NYT did a piece on some political bloggers who were pulling in six figures a year in ad revenue.

 

Thank you for pointing that out. Key detail indeed. Even though Hoops' company doesn't have to be the norm, this makes me wonder why we're reading so much discussion here lately about journalists being laid off to go along with the usual bantering about how little they are paid.

 

I'm pretty certain Bandwagon Boy stacks cheese. He's an award-winning sports jernalist.

 

They have to keep up the damn stock price, that's why. To my knowledge, the only major dailies that actually fail to make a profit are the New York Post and Washington Times, which are subsidized by their owners so they may voice their conservative agenda. We're making lots of money, but now we are on that treadmill trying to keep up the pace we set in better economic times.

 

Gawker media does very well, considering the low overhead. I'm 99% certain that Gawker, Defamer, etc pay their writers between $45,000-$65,000 a year. And they have benefits.

Other small blogs ... who knows. We're new, and the ads are few, so we're not making a living off the blog ... yet. We're still in the 'doing it for fun because it's so damn fun' stage.