According to 2008's State of the Blogosphere, the most successful blogs are the ones that post at least five times per day. Success, in this case, being the highest Technorati Authority rankings. These rankings, by turn, are based on the number of other bloggers that link to your stuff and the authority of those bloggers.
This seems to paint a picture of a small cudgel of high-volume bloggers massively cross-linking each other, possibly because compulsive five-times-daily bloggers would theoretically always be in search of new material, and seeing what everyone else is doing (and reacting to it) is a fertile ground for blog fodder. This is mere cynical supposition, mind you, but I'd lay some money on it being at least partially true.
Whether Technorati rank translates to actual fiscal success is a muddier cause-and-effect to fathom. The majority of bloggers don't make any money at their blogs, but the average household income of most bloggers is over $75,000 a year. (Granted, this is only the subset of bloggers that have listed themselves in Technorati, but that would likely include anybody who either gets paid for blogging and/or does it at least five times daily.) This suggests most blogging is a hobby for college-educated middle-class folks, not a serious money-making venture.
What I'd really like to see is a breakdown of the Top 100, Top 1000, and Top 10,000 bloggers by authority as applies to income. Simply, does Authority convert to money? My guess is at the very high end, it might correlate, but that the correlation declines sharply and disproportionately as you drop out of the Top 100. I'm also betting the volume of posting declines as you decline the list, too. I don't have the means or the werewithal to post 25-30 blog entries per week--not without quitting my day job--and I never will.
Blogging is a hobby. Some folks can be professionalhobbyists--I mean, there are guys that make their living trading baseball cards, after all--but they are rare. And most people who play the guitar never make a dime off of it. Dreaming of being a pro blogger is a lot like dreaming of being a pro musician or pro athlete--most of us just aren't going to make it. Don't stop playing, just stop expecting to get paid.
The above is Gary Vaynerchuk's keynote speech from the New Media Expo, wherein he lays out how his Wine Library TV online video show became perhaps the most successful and well known Web show going.
Here's Gary's recipe for success:
Production values don't matter, just the content.
Do a show about your biggest passion, and nothing else.
Promote your show 6-10 hours per day, 6 days per week, for at least 18 months and you MIGHT get popular.
Promote your show on every platform, every service, every network.
Hypersyndicate - Don't upload to one video site, upload to every site.
Answer EVERY e-mail.
Expose every avenue of contact. Publish your IM handles, your Twitter name, and your Skype number, etc..
Court every single fan, personally, for as long as you can.
Build your brand, not someone else's.
PATIENCE!
Having helped build a (very minor) Web franchise from the ground up, I agree with every single one of these tenets. And it just shows how few people will succeed in Web video (or Web content in general). Vaynerchuck basically worked a 50 hour uncompensated workweek for a year and half to get to decent traffic, and another two and a half years at the same pace to get where he is now. He could get away with that because he was using video as a loss leader for his multimillion-dollar liquor sales business, from which he could draw income. Vaynerchuk had a unique monetization model, which the only way you can remotely make the argument that he got a return on his time investment.
Now, there are ways to hedge out some of what Vaynerchuk did with some rather pricey outsourcing services, but that still does not fundamentally change the math that Web video will almost never be a serious fiscal endeavor for anyone. The return on your time is hideously low. It's is the ultimate low margin business and--what's worse--it pays out slow. The question for most of us is earn a little money fast or a lot of money slowly. Video is the worst of both, offering very little money over a very long time. Standard ad models just make it not worthwhile.
And all that is assuming you've got your hands on a passionate subject matter expert who can convey attractive Web video content covering a subject that people care about in sufficient numbers that you can profitably monetize it. Trust me, those people don't grow on trees, and those subject areas are already being hotly contested in text, and video is coming up on it fast. I'm still writing Geek Trivia after leaving CNet because they despaired of finding someone who could write what I write the way I write it. It's not high art, but my fans like it and there's sponsorship behind it, so they made an exception and pay me to keep doing it. And believe me, back when I was on the CNet payroll, I looked for people who could blog the way I do (so I could take a break after almost seven years writing the column) and couldn't find them. Talent is scarce, and it doesn't scale. Blogging already has this problem, and video is going to have it worse.
But Web video is getting bigger every year, right? Experts are projecting 25 percent year over year growth in online video advertising over the next five years. Video consumption online may increase by 5 percent a month, according to some numbers I've seen, for the same period. What's going to give?
The ad numbers, probably. By this point, everyone was supposed to be dumping billions into social network advertising, and it just never materialized to the degree everyone expected at the height of the 2006 MySpace/Facebook boom. (Insider hint: Media companies are really good at publicizing all the predictions that benefit them, and few to none of those that don't. Never believe the self-referencing "people are going to give us money" hype.) Online video will likely have the same scaled-down reality come this time next year.
So where does that leave the content producers? Mostly, you better love what you do, because the odds of you getting paid anything approaching a fair wage for your work are pretty astronomical. It's becoming more obvious on the blogging front that your blog better be a labor of love, because even professional bloggers don't make much money at actual blogging and the odds of you outplaying a pro are pretty unlikely. Video will follow the same track.
More to the point, once the big boys from old media figure out exactly how the monetization model is going to work, they'll flood the available market with known brands and suck up the few available dollars for themselves. We all fondly revere the guy at the indie magazine who refuses to join the corporate machine, but he gets paid like a guy who refuses to join the corporate machine. Indie blogs and indie video shows will always exist, but the democritization of opportunity--the big guys no longer own the means of distribution, unlike the printing press and broadcast tower days--mean the artificially high margins that media used to enjoy are over, and the value associated with producing these media have declined.
Put simply, there ain't much money in online content. Plan your career accordingly.
My buddy Rob pointed me to this great blog post about how hard it is to earn money from blogging. There are a lot of really great economic analyses at work here, but what it really comes down to is this: Too many people are chasing too few dollars for anyone to make a living.
The whole point of blogging is to democratize Web publishing. The barrier to entry is so low that almost anybody can blog, so almost everybody (seemingly) does. Ironically, there's a whole universe of people auditioning to be the next Robert Scoble when Scoble himself (according to the article) is having trouble making money at what he does.
Doubly ironic, as a guy who makes part of his living blogging, I'm happy about this. Here's why.
There are four areas of competition for any product or service in a capitalist system: Product (quality), Price (cost), Promotion (awareness), Placement (convenience). Do I know something exists, is it worth buying, at what price, and where can I get it?
On the Internet, there are really only 1.5 avenues of competition.
Placement online is nonexistent, as anything on the Internet is available everywhere on the Internet, barring some national censorship or workplace ISP filters. The price for content is free, as anyone who tries to charge for content has more or less failed. So that leaves Product and Promotion, and I think promotion is really only half an avenue of competition anymore.
Another buddy, Jason Falls, argues that promotion is where the next big fight is online. That's why everyone is nuts over Twitter and Facebook and, until recently, blogs--they're a new, untapped avenue for promotion. But they're promoting offline goods online. They're middlemen. So what promotes these social media goods and services? Search.
TechMeme and its brethren autoblogs has automated the process that Fark, Digg and BoingBoing do manually--selecting cool and popular stuff for a specific audience. Google News operates similarly. While I'll never concede that automated aggregation will be of higher quality than human-chosen aggregation, it's already good enough to compete and will only get better. Just as with SEO, I foresee an arms race of PR-trained techies out there trying to find new ways to game these automated systems, and engineers countering the gaming, such that wild swings or radical successes are rare. Filtering out the "good stuff" from the democratized Web will only get easier for content consumers, which is a good thing for readers and rough for promoters and bloggers.
So where does that leave us bloggers looking to make a dime? With no choice but to be the good stuff. The Web is inching towards forcing everyone, everywhere to compete on quality as applies to content. The good stuff will get aggregated. The good stuff will get consumed. The good stuff will get monetized. The people who consistently make the good stuff will get paid, which is good and bad.
Quality content requires quality content creators. In other words, talent. And here's the scary part: Talent doesn't scale.
You can't turn one good blogger into five good bloggers by throwing more servers at the problem. You have to go out and find, groom, and pay five good bloggers. And there's rarely a magic formula for finding them. They're a rare commodity, but those that can do the job can expect that in the near future they'll be paid their true worth for the service.
That said, it's not enough to be first anymore, because any blog worth doing is going to have hordes of amateur competitors out there doing it for the love, not the money, and occasionally doing it faster or better than you. The secret will be in consistency of quality--being good often enough to assure regular readership and regular monetization. Success will be hard. Success will be expensive. Success will be slow. But I'm betting the payoff will be worth it.
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