Which age of blogging are we in?
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything in this category, but the question above came up to me when I was talking with my friend, David Peralty. Although some might answer that question almost immediately from the top of their heads, and clearly state that right blogging is in the middle, or entering, a golden era, I have to contest that opinion.
Social networking has never been as big as it is now, and most people I know, even the less tech-savvy, have an account on at least one of those websites, and most of them keep track of the events in their lives through a chronological order. Blogging has been completely molded into those sites, and although some might claim that they never owned a blog, they may just be blogging unaware.
But what about professional blogging?
Sixteen years ago, and for 30 years before that, my father was the editor of the most popular local newspaper here in Madeira. The payments were low, the hours he put in were long (at the very least, 12 hours a day), and what kept him going the most was really the love for the profession. Is professional blogging today very different from this?
Today, most newspapers manage to succeed, whether they are printing or showing their articles online, there have never been as many journalistic sources for news as there are now. And the money that the journalists, and editors, earn, is actually quite a lot, compared to what it was a couple of decades ago.
Let’s look at professional blogging today. Despite the reports of 6 figure earnings, like those of ProBlogger.net’s Darren Rowse, not everyone is as sucessful as he is, in monetary terms. To give you a small idea, some editors may earn, some professional bloggers get payed less than $5 per article.
To write an article, you can waste as much as time time as a whole hour looking for the most accurate report, or something “worthy” of being posted on the website. But sometimes it can also be as quick as 15 or 30 minutes. But how many of these would you need to write in order to earn a good payment, enough to make a living?
Crunching the numbers…
Let’s see, imagine you can write 8 articles per day, one or two of which have to be product analysis ones. If you’re being payed 5$ per article, which is already considered a “great” payment in the blogging industry, you’d be able to earn $800 a month. Although you can write many more articles than that per day, you can only so many decent articles per an hour.
If your employer has high standards, the best you’ll be able to come with is around 6 articles in 8 hours, which would be complete product analysis, and probably earn you twice as much as a normal article would. Even so, the monthly wage you’d receive would still be very close to that of the minimum wage.
It’s not uncommon for professional bloggers, who live solemly from their blogging earnings to work over 12 hours per day, which is how long my father worked for two decades ago in journalism, and he earned quite more than the minimum wage, although it was nowhere as good as what the earnings are today (in journalism).
And don’t forget that there isn’t any “clear” way to declare your earnings for tax payment. The best thing you can do is to setup your own company for computer services, and use the earnings from that to declare your taxes.
The blogging industry is indeed blooming, and more professionals emerge each month. But I don’t think that we can call this the “golden” age yet. Right now only those with a nack for business, or a great love for blogging should consider taking it up as a professional career.
