eMarketer: What are your thoughts on the monetization potential of blogging?
Elisa Camahort Page: There are two ways people make money off blogs.
The first way is they make money with their blog. Typically that’s an advertising, sponsorship or affiliate model—running something on your blog that makes you money.
“The more page views you have, the more money you can make.”
And in almost every case, the more page views you have, the more money you can make, either because it’s a CPM-based model like BlogHer, where you get paid per page view or impression, or pay per click. Affiliate models are also traffic-based. It’s all a numbers game. The more traffic you generate, the more likelihood you’ll have to get more click-throughs that result in money.
Either way, making money with your blog is a traffic-based opportunity. And so it’s only the very biggest blogs who really make a substantial income that way.
However, the other opportunity is to make money because of your blog, and there are way more people doing this. Their blog is their platform—it gets them attention. And from there they get
freelance writing work and editorial opportunities. They get consulting gigs. They get speaking gigs and honoraria. They create a portfolio career.
eMarketer: What types of blogs are you seeing more or less of in the past six
months, and has the economic situation changed the nature of blogs at all?
Ms. Camahort Page: Yes, it completely has.
“Bloggers want to be relevant to their audience and their community.”
All bloggers, like any other media out there, want to be relevant to their audience and their community. And a lot of their audience and community not only may have less money, but
they may have less time to spend being entertained by all of us bloggers
because they’re worried about their job or they’re now working two jobs. So
you’ll see a lot of bloggers starting to incorporate recession-oriented content
into what they do.
For instance, there’s a blogger called Wine-Girl, who’s an award-winning wine writer who keeps a blog. And she has started a Recession Wine of the Week—where she talks about how to get a great bottle of wine for less than $10.
eMarketer: What factors account for the growth in the numbers of bloggers and blog readers?
“One reason the blogosphere is growing is because of how easy it is to publish a blog.”
Ms. Camahort Page: One reason the blogosphere is growing is because of how
easy it is to publish a blog. You don’t have to know HTML to be publishing
online. It’s also very affordable. A lot of the software tools are free. Plus, more and more sites are adding opportunities to blog without having to even run your own site.
eMarketer: What factors drive women to start blogs?
Ms. Camahort Page: There are four drivers for why women read and write blogs.
The first is self-expression. The second is to build their community. The third is for information and advice. And the fourth is just for fun and entertainment. There’s a lot of great writing out there, and reading a blog can be just as fun or fulfilling as reading a great novel or watching a sitcom.
Making money is not among the top motivators.
For almost every blogger I know, making money is awesome, and they want to do a good job and improve their sites if it helps them do better at that. But it doesn’t outweigh the fact that they want to maintain their community, that they want to be able to express themselves and they want to be a great resource and find great resources they can trust.
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Note: To read about BlogHer reseach, click to the eMarketer article, Women Who Blog.