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.
