By Lou Dolinar
Last  in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime.

Two years ago, the odds were even longer. The main source of income for bloggers was panhandling, for example, putting the ubiquitous PayPal (www.paypal.com) or Amazon Honor System micropayment bug on your site, and periodically passing the metaphorical tip jar among the faithful for an electronic funds transfer. Even the most successful bloggers were barely making beer money, and were astonished when Libertarian Republican Andrew Sullivan announced his blog's fund drive had earned enough, along with some ads for Amazon (www.Amazon.com), to hire an assistant.

Since then the economics of blogging have shifted rapidly, thanks to a simple but brilliant idea called Blogads, which allows bloggers to outsource the equivalent of a newspaper's business and advertising departments, and focus solely on writing. You report! You decide! Blogads sends check!

Here's how it works, according to founder Henry Copeland, an ex-journalist: You go to the www.Blogads.com Web site and sign up for the service, then fill out forms describing your blog and how much you want to charge per ad. (There are a couple hundred "rate cards" along with traffic reports, for other blogs, so you get a pretty good idea of what the market's like.) Blogads then generates a custom piece of Javascript code for your site, which creates a meter that counts page impressions and relays the data

back to the Blogads server.

"It's a wonderful self-feeding furnace," Copeland says. "We're now getting 100 million page impressions per month." That's within "spitting distance" of some of the bigger news sites, such as The New York Times at 400 million impressions, he says.

Potential advertisers browse the Blogads site, check out the linked blogs and the ad rates. They create the ad online, using a postage-stamp-sized ad unit, and transfer the money via PayPal. Blogads takes a cut of the action and sends the balance to the blogger via PayPal.

Judging from data on the Blogads site, a couple dozen bloggers are making mid- to high five-figure salaries from Blogads, and a few are doing even better. Daily Kos, a site by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga for left-ish activists, is billing out about $12,000 per week, or more than $600,000 per year. Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit pulls in almost half that.

Atrios, aka Duncan Black, says that for most people, "It's not enough to make a living, but you can make a supplemental living." Still, his own experience is interesting: Blogads, which mostly cover politics, campaigns and books about politics, took off in January, as the presidential election began to heat up. Until then, Black was happy to be bringing in about $2,000 per month; now he brings in more than $7,000.

No one's sure of the degree to which these good times will last past the election. Still, most experts think that, financially, blogging is in its infancy. Says Copeland: "Some day it could be five to 10 thousand people doing more than buying beer with it."

Another option for bloggers is Google's AdSense, (www.google.com/adsense) now integrated into Blogger,

Google's freebie blog-hosting service. AdSense works just like the contextual ads that Google serves up on search results, for example, on a blog, they're keyed to content, such that if, say, your blog is on photography, AdSense would bring up a column of ads for cameras and photos from Google's usual pool of advertising. If a reader clicks on an ad and buys something, you get a tiny cut of the revenue.

Alas, the service isn't terribly popular among bloggers because the returns appear to be minimal. How minimal isn't clear, since part of the AdSense contract requires you to keep your mouth shut about income. It does make sense to try it for a narrowly focused blog, particularly one that's about stuff rather than politics. A blog on watches would probably do pretty well.

Another possible revenue source is Amazon Associates, from giant online vendor/ bookseller Amazon.com. This takes a tad bit more work to set up: Amazon provides you with little ad bugs you embed as links on your site. A click through to a purchase can earn as much as 10.2 percent commission. Sullivan has written he's done fairly well with book links to Amazon, though he appears to give increasing space to Blogads. Hundreds of other companies offer similar affliate agreements.