Late last month Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's notoriously inept campaign pollster, published an article in the Wall Street Journal asserting that "there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters."
Penn's lunacy, buttressed by the claim that almost half a million Americans used blogging as their primary source of income, prompted howls of derision from bloggers themselves. "Fantastically bogus and clueless," Mickey Kaus wrote on the Slate website.
But as the ranks of print journalists dwindle, and the army of Lilliputian opinioneers swells, wouldn't it be nice to know if there is money to be made blogging? I have been monitoring the career of ace
There is a small aristocracy of early adapting bloggers who have become successful online publishers, such as Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos or Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. If you can get a media giant like New York Times Digital or the Atlantic magazine to pay you to blog, good on you. There are well-read academic bloggers such as Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, who blogs for free. He writes textbooks, he has a nice day job - it's all good, as the kids say.
Then there is everyone else. Millions of them. The website Technorati pegged bloggers' median annual costs at $80 and the median average revenue at $200. Bloggers with advertising spent a mean of $1,800 on their sites and harvested bigger bucks, about $6,000 a year. Enough to feed a family of four. Mice.
How do you make money? By driving traffic to your website. I kidded Walter Olson, who created overlawyered.com, that he should keep his eyes peeled for Britney Spears-Kevin Federline litigation. He has his own secret: chimp attacks. "So far as I can tell, every post on chimpanzee attacks over the years has drawn thousands of new visitors," he says. Chimp-free overlawyered attracts about 9,000 visitors daily.
The various Internet ad schemes run by Google, Blogads, TypePad and others aren't so different from newspaper advertising; the larger your audience, the more you can charge. There are ancillary ways of earning money, like soliciting donations to a digital "tip jar." "Andrew Sullivan did well with that, by adopting the PBS begging model," says an admiring Virginia Postrel, of dynamist.com.
Postrel and many others generate some revenue through the
My friend Art Jahnke started his SportsGeezer website four years ago, and has built traffic to about 3,000 visitors a day. He posts one item daily, usually a link to an article about sports and health. Certain posts precipitate audience surges; men flock to articles about prostate cancer, for instance. "I made $88 yesterday," he told me earlier this week, about double his usual take. Why? He linked to an article claiming that resistance training, such as lifting weights, lowers blood pressure, a finding that is catnip for his gassed-out boomer readers.
Jahnke deals with Google AdSense, which places ads ("One Rule of a Flat Stomach") down the left hand side of his blog. Just as some authors check their Amazon sales rankings every few hours, Art checks his ad revenue several times a day. "I never know how much money will be coming in," he says. "Google works in mysterious ways. I've tried to find out how they calculate my cut, with no luck. Google isn't a person, it's a force. Who would you call?"
I called Google, and they declined to comment.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
