The Wall Street Journal Online held an online debate of sorts between Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis and Jupiter Media’s Alan Meckler over the topic of whether or not bloggers can make money.
A brief snippet:
Alan Meckler writes:
Jason, good stuff as usual for one so sharp and original! But look at the number you have in your reply — 500,000 per month (page views) is virtually unattainable for 99.999% of all bloggers.
My blog only gets about 300,000 per month — so with your model I might make enough money per month to buy a candy bar. And I have the advantage of getting promotion through the Internet.com home page as well as many links to other bloggers.
Your concepts are good, but once again only for a selected few.
The blogosphere is alive with discussion about the debate.
One of the more insightful posts comes from Duncan Riley:
The truth, of course, is some where in between. Meckler is right when he says 99.99% of bloggers aren’€™t going to make any serious money, but lets consider the fact that even if 0.01% are, that’€™s roughly 20,000 people out there who are going to make serious money from blogging.
I think the real lesson here is that most folks blog for fun – to entertain themselves, their families, and so on. Only a few are blogging for profit – or as a part of a business. And as I’ve said before, most of those businesses don’t have a plan (or much of a clue) of how they’re going to grow and monetize their blogging.
But is there money to be made in blogging? Oh yes, there is…
