Well here's a wasted debate, other than to give Alan Meckler and Jason Calacanis some exposure. Can Bloggers Make Money? has them going at it about whether blogging can turn into money. Alan says most won't. Jason says they will if you group them together. For what it's worth, I say try reading the debate by inserting the word "web site" for blog.

Blogs are just web sites, OK? I'd wager the majority of web sites do not make money. Why? Every personal home page, every university help file, every thing you put on the web is a web site. Lots of them are commercial in nature; plenty are not.

Engadget makes money, but is that because it's a blog? Please, it's a web site -- a commercial web site with editorial content that advertisers find worthwhile associating themselves with. Are they buying it because it's a blog or for the audience? The audience. They aren't buying because oh look, you can comment there or oh look, each article has a permalink or oh look, each new article comes listed on top of older articles.

Is the audience coming because it's a blog? Maybe a few who like the idea they can comment, if you then rigidly assume something is a blog because it has comments. But in my 10 year anniversary article, I joked about how I would have been a blogger now for 10 years, if we had blogs back when I started writing about search. We didn't. And yet miraculously, a good content site somehow struggled on.

Honestly, my eyes roll over how blog networks are going to be the new big thing. You mean like the Mining Company? I mean, like About? It's the same flippin' idea, but packaged up with a new name and some new features. Some people did do better by running under the About.com umbrella. It made it easier for some to publish and be sold. Others like myself looked at the Mining Co. when it launched and figured we'd do better on our own, as independents.

Yeah, AdSense came along around the same time that blogging software made it even easier for individuals to publish. Having to do FTP transfers or even have a HTML coding tool wasn't as necessary, and surviving on more than a pittance from Amazon links helped. But blogs remain web sites -- and the "blogging" explosion is simply a continuation of the publishing explosion we've long had on the web. Anyone publishing good content can earn money. And plenty of people without good content still make money by scraping search results and RSS feeds to simulate good content :)

Overall, the argument has this big disconnect. It's not about whether blogs can make money. It's about whether those who publish in any way are trying to make money.

Here on Daggle, I make "candy bar" money as Alan puts it. I'm not writing about any particular focused topic or with some intention of this being my business. If I were really into that, I'd sit down with Jen, who'd tell me to fix all the wrong things I do with my AdSense ads. Or better, I'd split all my stuff about multiple monitors into a multiple monitor blog to better pull in advertisers and an audience. If I was really, really into it, I'd pick an especially good, popular topic, slam home constantly with great posts and insight, then run over and see if John's FM Publishing would take me on.

I don't do that because I have a pretty successful day job, writing about search at Search Engine Watch -- which is a web site that also has a blog that itself is a web site. And that blog is successful not because blogs can make money but because the intention of that blog is to be a commercial enterprise.

How about Matt? He's got a huge, successful blog these days. He could totally make money off it, if he wanted. I haven't asked him about this, but I doubt he wants to or cares to. It's a place for him to talk about what he's interested in, not as a backup plan in case, you know, the whole Google gig doesn't work out.

So save us the "can blogs make money debate." Of course they can. Any web site can and will make money, if the author(s) are good and the intention to earn is there.

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