Someone on my Twitter feed post a link to Dan Lyon’s column about how bloggers aren’t making money. While some of what Lyons is saying is correct, he is grossly mistaken that blogging doesn’t make money.
Before I go into dissecting his column, someone should be correcting him that he identified himself before the New York Times published a story that revealed his identity.
And he failed to mentioned that his blog got him a book deal.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the real reason he left Forbes was because his actions on his blog, impersonating Apple CEO Steve Jobs, were due to huge ethics violations that goes against everything what proper journalism is for.
He goes on to mention tech-bloggers Valleywag and TechCrunch. First of all, your credentials as a tech journalists should be thrown out the window for comparing ValleyWag to a tech blog – it’s more of a gossip blog that was geared towards a handful of people in Silicon Valley and nobody outside San Francisco understood the blog.
I wonder why they were having a hard time getting advertisers to the blog?
TechCrunch may be having a hard time getting a buyer that will pony up $100 million in a rough economy, mainly because the blog nothing but public relations firms that represent start-ups companies looking to get publicity on a stupid idea that will go nowhere.
The real problem with TechCrunch, as well as all blogs, is that if they want to bring in money, they need in an in-house sales department.
The only part he’s right about is blogging will make you little, if not no, money at all. Quitting your day job and hoping to bring in loads of money by putting Google AdSense ads on your blog will not make you successful – financial wise. If you want to become a popular blog, you need fresh content and you need experience in what your blogging about. Putting up a blog with nothing but news items from Engadget, Digg, or Techmeme on your blog will not get people to your blog, they go to those sites instead.
Not all blogs can be failures, especially outside technology. I wonder why he failed to mentioned Perez Hilton’s blog, especially since he has a radio deal with Premiere Radio, or the several mommy-blogs that are on the Federated Media blogvertising network.
So if you want to write about a passion and get little-or-no income, go be a blogger.
Now you know how a journalist feels when they get their paychecks.