6 Comments

Do you make $75k / Year Blogging?

Jun 10, 2009
by

According to Mark Penn’s article in the Wall St. Journal, there are over 20 million bloggers out there, and according to a recent Technorati poll, 2% of them are making a living through blogging.  That’s more than 400,000 people!  The article goes on to discuss how the Technorati poll suggests it takes approximately 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate $75k per  year in income.

“Technorati report says that of those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, the average income is $75,000″

1% of American adults are generating some income through blogging, and that number is increasing daily.

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.

I am not sure exacly where Penn get’s his figures about $75k being the target for “making a living”.  I guess that all depends on where you live and what your cost of living is?  I wonder if we will see a trend of people with these types of jobs moving to places with very low costs of living?  It’s a job that could be done anywhere in the world!

Filed under: Social Media
  • http://www.experienceadvertising.com Evan

    Adam great info. Thanks for sharing!

  • http://www.rhinofish.com Pat Grady

    "That’s more than 400k people!"

    I like the way you put this into perspective. That is an impressive figure!

    With such low barriers to entry, I'm thinking that 2% is actually a stunningly high success rate. I would have guessed it was more than one order of magnitude lower. In the terms you expressed it in, I'd have guessed it was less than 10,000 people.

    So, Internet, if you're enabling 400,000 people to make a living in just the blogospere, bully on you, you rock!

  • http://richrancher.wordpress.com yisroel

    Interesting piece of information – do you happen to know of specific bloggs making this type of income consistently and are actually owned by the blogger or even a wordpress free blog ? – this is of great interest to me personnaly as I am a blogger.

  • http://www.imwave.com Adam Viener

    Check out this link for some more info:
    http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/trends/only_…

  • http://www.rhinofish.com Pat Grady

    Here's the original survey data, from the 2008 Blogger / Blogging survey done by Technorati:
    http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogo…

    The report was published over 5 days, each focusing on a different perspective of the data. The link above takes you to the main page, you'll see day1 thru day5 navigation in the middle of the page.

    Another way to look at the active versus inactive blogs:

    According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

  • http://www.switched-on.info Poyel Nelson

    Very interesting stuff. 100 K Unique Visitors can thus serve as a goal for bloggers. It would be interesting to learn more about monetization, or is this just advertisement / PPC?