On one of my well-deserved breaks yesterday I clicked over to Slate Magazine and found this article on How Bloggers Make Money, which is based on a report from Technorati on the "state of the Blogosphere. We're not talking about dribs and drabs here, but the big bucks! Some of the blogs are thoughtful, such as the productivity-boosting 43 Folders, but others are nothing more than gossip, like Perez Hilton's -- oh, noooooo, not another Hilton! or amusements, like LOL Cats, which rakes in $5,600 a month by running an ongoing competition of silly-captioned cat photos, in among their copious collection of ads. And then there are the Fug Girls, who are cleaning up by being catty about celebrities. And don't all we girls just dream of doing that for a living?
And you know those ubiquitous Google ads you see on so many blogs? Well, some people actually do make money on them. Some guy who calls himself Shoemoney got a check for $132,994.97 one month from AdSense. He looks all of sixteen! He says, "100% of this income was earned with organic seo. I had not heard of search engine arbitrage at the time and did not buy traffic from MSN Yahoo or Google itself." Uh, what? Ni modo, don't try to explain what it is, I probably wouldn't understand.
Do I have pathetic fantasies of turning my little blog into some sort of powerhouse moneymaker? Not really, it's just that our small publishing business has been threatened of late by the US Post Awful which did away with the mode of shipping we'd been using for years on 24 hours' notice, followed by the printer who, two weeks from presstime, informed me he will no longer warehouse the overrun so I have to distribute all my books in one swell foop at staggering co$t. And a gloomy premonition like a dark cloud looms over my weary head, about how the economy is going to affect my clients, many of whom are of the mom-and-pop variety.
Call me a skeptic, but I suspect the evilly-conceived Bailout will fund a lot of golden parachutes and golden handshakes. Nobody is going to get his foreclosed home back, nobody is going to see his devastated IRA replenished or get his job back.
I don't even want to look at my IRA, though I'm aware that's the attitude that keeps me from prospering. I should be keeping a beady on it at all times, I suppose.
P.S. The Capt says organic seo is a type of "search engine optimization." And I Googled "search engine arbitrage" to find it's a means of buying ads from search engines and re-selling them at a higher price.
