Flogging Blogging

 
I don’t write blogs for money, which is fortunate because like two-thirds of bloggers I don’t make any. OK, that’s not entirely true, but so close to entirely as to make no difference. All the money passed along from Google for all the ads on my site since the first one in January 2009 (a few cents here, a few there) might add up to enough to cover the cost of today’s lunch (a Philly cheesesteak from Marilyn’s) but I doubt it. Nonetheless, this is my 800^th post (a nice round number that inspired this bit of retrospection), which is somewhat more than one post per week over the past 12 years. The number of readers varies one week to the next, but there are a few hundred in an average week, which is not enough to be remunerative but enough to be gratifying.
 
It is possible to make money blogging, and there is plenty of advice on the net and elsewhere telling you how to do that. The key is specializing in a particular niche such as dietary advice, financial advice, relationship advice, or…well…advice on how to make money blogging. And then there is politics, the more dehumanizing of one’s opponents the better. While this always generates a lot of hateful feedback, regardless of what the blog’s ideological content might be, it also generates traffic. (I don’t do this: not because I lack a political viewpoint [I’ve been active in a third party] but because there is more than enough of all that on the net. Besides, political “discussions” tend to drive out all others in a sort of Gresham’s Law of discourse, and there is so much else to write about.) So, even though 90% of bloggers earn nothing or a pittance, 2% earn over six-figures. Many of these successful bloggers are associated with related commercial operations, such as travel blogs on sites that sell travel packages or health blogs on sites that sell dietary supplements. Some of the statistics are puzzling. For example, blogs over 2000 words attract the most readers (2500 is the sweet spot) yet the average reader spends only 37 seconds on the site. According to a Wiki article on Speed Reading, a typical reader reads at a rate of 250 words per minute while “proficient readers are able to read 280–310 wpm without compromising comprehension.” So, I have to assume those 2500-word blogs aren’t getting a very thorough examination. But if the goal of the poster is just ad-clicks, I guess that doesn’t matter.

For those who want to try to make money this way, have at it and best of luck. Most of us have other reasons for doing it. I just kind of like it. I could expand on that: writing about a variety of topics prompts me to look into them more deeply, which is fun in itself and provides fodder for dinner conversations (remember when there were dinner conversations?); it’s a way of keeping one’s writing skills from decaying too rapidly; and it serves as a sort of online scrapbook, a reminder of where one’s head was at 5, 10, or more years ago. All of which means, I just kind of like it. I recommend it to anyone with even a slight literary itch.
 
It is, of course, a self-indulgent thing to do, but it has advantages over the other two similar self-indulgences: autobiography and journals, both of which are unabashedly about oneself. Blogging at least purports to be about things of more general interest. Besides, autobiographies are books of lies: some of commission but especially of omission. Anyone who wouldn’t leave significant things out of an autobiography has led a singularly uninteresting life. Journals (unless intended from the start to be for publication) on the other hand are more truthful by design but for that very reason are unwise in today’s world. Psychologists, educators, and therapists often urge keeping a journal as a mental health measure; it is a place where you can express privately all those things on your mind that you would leave out of an autobiography. There always has been a risk of forgetfully leaving it out where some visitor can sneak a peek at it with unfortunate consequences, but prior to the 1990s the damage was likely to be limited. There also generally was plausible deniability if the sneak-reader repeated anything. Nowadays with cell phone photos and scanners the pages can be uploaded in seconds. Privacy never can be assumed anymore, either for the spoken or written word. It is unwise to commit to writing anywhere anything you would not want publicly exposed for all to see. We write blogs with that in mind from the start, so it is not so much a problem.
 
Off course, discretion is not everyone’s strongest attribute. Most people who post unwisely get away with it most of the time because most of the time nobody cares. But one cannot always count on disinterest and ignoration. A prime example of misplaced confidence is the so-called Bling Ring of teenagers about a dozen years ago who burglarized celebrities’ homes in the LA area while posting on social media. (The surprising thing is that they got away with it for a year; Sofia Coppola’s movie The Bling Ring about the events is worth a look.) But even a minor faux pas sometimes can go viral. So, with appropriate caution, the reader (if not already doing so) might consider joining the 600,000,000 bloggers that already exist worldwide. You could be among the 2% that make a good living at it. At the very least, in about a dozen years it could pay for your lunch.
 

Stereophonics - Mr. Writer