Wall Street Journal

All media starts with content. And most content starts with creators. When we think about the future of content, we’re really asking how creative people will make money.

A while back I did some analysis of the economics of special interest publishing, and speculated about what a writer could make blogging about a passion. One conclusion was that with the barrier to entry so low for an individual to create compelling content about a passion, and the possibility of earning a living on their own so realistic, a lonely blogger became a fierce source of competition for a fully-staffed publication.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article today looking at just that question: the economics of the blogger. The results were bullish.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

According to MediaFinder.com, there are just under 17,000 magazines in the U.S. If we assume that those magazines have an average editorial staff of 4, that would give us about 68,000 paid magazine editorial staffers. Assume that the magazines use about 10 freelancers a year and we’d have another 170,000 people getting paid for writing.

I’m hard pressed to get to 452,000 people making their money from writing for magazines.

So, nearly half a million people making money from blogs is either outlandishly wrong (and the writer did post a rebuttal to a number of comments suggesting he was way off base), or a profound testament to the ineffable power of Google’s Adsense network.

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