Judging by the number of blogging services on the world Internet, almost every web user keeps a diary or participates in a collective blog. It has long been thought of that in this way one can not only express oneself, but also earn money - however, the results of implementing the idea abroad and in RuNet vary greatly.

VLADIMIR BOROVOY

How to sell a hobby

On a global scale, the blogosphere is a mass phenomenon that is constantly growing larger. Technorati, the leading blog search engine, has been conducting statistical research for five years and has seen the growth of this area of the web: in October 2004, it recorded about 5 million blogs, and at the end of 2008 - more than 133 million. For most specialized participants, blogging is not a way to make money, although among those who do it for fun, more than half hope to someday receive profit from it expressed in monetary terms. The share of hobbyists among bloggers, according to Technorati in the fall of 2009, is 72%. The remaining 28% (that's more than 37 million blogs) turn their blogging efforts into hard cash, of which 54% do this to earn extra money, 32% use a blog to improve the efficiency of their business, and 14% write a blog on behalf of an employer. Bloggers from the last category usually sit on a salary, while in the first two cases they earn money by placing advertising banners and links, speaking at various events on the topic of their blog, as well as in other ways, among which writing paid postings is in last place in importance . All of the above usually brings in from $1 thousand to $10 thousand per month.

Among those who make money from blogging, there are their own stars and millionaires. One of the most striking examples is the collective blog Boing-Boing. It all started in 1988 with a paper amateur magazine dedicated, among other things, to high technology, science fiction, intellectual property issues and Disney comics. Boing-Boing evolved into a website in 1995 and a blog in 2000, billed as a “catalog of wonderful things,” edited by four people—Mark Frauenfelder, David Peskowitz, Cory Doctorow, and Chenie Jardin. In 2004, the project acquired a legal entity - Happy Mutants LLC, a business manager in the person of John Battell (one of the founders of Wired magazine) and advertising on the website. At the same time, according to the memoirs of Cory Doctorow, Battell promised that the project “would be more difficult to earn a little money, like to pay for an Internet connection, than to earn really a lot and turn into a permanent source of income.” And so it happened: today’s blog with more than 9 million subscribers, while remaining, in fact, a completely non-commercial resource, provides its creators with an annual income of $5 million.

In another success story, the blog has grown into a full-fledged online media resource, while maintaining its unique features, in particular, specific humor on the verge of what is permitted. We are talking about one of the two main blogs dedicated to consumer electronics and computers - Gizmodo (8.5 million visitors per month). It started in 2002 and was initially led by Peter Rojas, a renowned tech journalist. However, he was soon lured away by Weblogs, which decided to create a direct competitor to Gizmodo called Engadget.

Gizmodo has joined forces with Gawker Media, a company that has bet on the development of the blogosphere. Already in mid-2004, they were earning $6 thousand a month, in 2006, according to the New York Times, the Gawker Media project, which in addition to Gizmodo included nine more blogs, turned into a plus, and in 2009 the value of the company headed by the British Nick Denton, estimated at $300 million, of which $60 million is advertising revenue.

Serious earnings go to not only serious bloggers who devote themselves to politics or technology. Thus, the creators of the blog icanhascheesburger.com Eric Nakagawa (Cheeseburger) and Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger) began by publishing funny photographs of cats with idiotic captions, and six months later they sold the resource to a group of investors Pet Holdings for $2 million, while remaining at its helm until To this day, frankly speaking, they are playing the fool, receiving $5,000 or more per week of placing an advertising banner.

Lost in translation

The Russian blogosphere occupies, according to various sources, from 5 to 8% of the world (from 8 million to 11 million blogs). In the early 2000s, when the Russian-language blogging space was almost equal to the space of the Cyrillic sector of the LiveJournal.com service, no one was going to make money from blogging. Moreover, the LiveJournal user agreement contained a clause prohibiting the use of your diary for most types of commercial activities and advertising—the violators’ journals were closed.

With the advent of the SUP company, which had been working with the Cyrillic sector of LJ since October 2006, and in December 2007 became the full owner of the entire service, ideas about transforming blogging efforts into money began to be thrown into the masses. While SUP was conducting a campaign to monetize traffic, practicing marketing, LJ users and users of other blogging services launched monetization of blogs.

Despite the fact that the term “monetization,” meaning the process of converting something into legal tender, has, as foreign comrades have shown, the most direct relation to blogs, the implementation of someone else’s experience in local conditions has not worked out very well. And if we consider the upper segment of blogger earnings, it did not happen at all: there is not a single person on the RuNet who has earned a million or at least $300-500 thousand in a year from his blog.

However, some money is still circulating in the Russian-language blogosphere, so the process, although lame, is progressing. If in 2007 monetization meant, as a rule, posting as many paid links as possible on a blog, then by the end of 2009 work was already being done in several directions: here are advertising links, banners, and postings, including postings with hidden advertising (“jeans”).

The pillars of the Russian blogosphere monetize their diaries selectively. For example, the well-known network figure Alex Exler (exler.ru; 35 thousand unique visitors per day) rents out advertising space on his website exclusively for banners - in his own words, he does not trade in advertising and custom materials, although some bloggers believe that Alex is disingenuous. Another significant character of the Runet, Dmitry Puchkov (Goblin; oper.ru; 50 thousand unique visitors per day), appears in approximately the same style. The average cost of a weekly banner display for Excel is $450, for Goblin it is twice as much. Designer Artemy Lebedev on his blog (tema.livejournal.com; 43.5 thousand readers) publishes paid postings five times a month, the price of which starts at $5 thousand, but, according to insider information, can be significantly reduced as a result of negotiations .

As you can see, in all the mentioned cases, earnings from a blog are not the main or particularly significant for its owner. According to the most optimistic estimates, popular Russian blogs are not able to bring their owners more than $100 thousand a year.

For less stellar characters in the Russian-language blogosphere, even the minimum level of monetization of a Western blogger ($1 thousand per month) is often unattainable. Among the main reasons hindering the earnings of our blog writers is the general disinterest of advertisers in them. If people involved in politics have already appreciated the importance of blogs and social networks for their business, then businessmen, especially large ones, have not yet fully believed in the information power of the blogosphere and bloggers, so they are in no hurry to advertise. However, more than uncurious entrepreneurs, blog readers are ruining monetization. Firstly, the majority of them will not buy anything that a monetizing blogger advertises—in particular, they will try to get free content in the form of music, movies, books or software. Secondly, very often a blogger’s attempts to show financial activity in his diary evoke a hostile reaction from readers, and they rush to reflect it in the comments, usually not constraining themselves with any decency. However, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the writer’s personality either. A blogger who knows how to use words, Adobe Photoshop, or has some other feature that is useful on the Internet (for example, a non-trivial sense of humor) may well use all this to improve his financial performance. At the same time, unscrupulousness in working with advertisers, clumsy implementation of their tasks and problems with intellectual development in general can ultimately guarantee the blog owner dull parties with half-dead advertising exchanges like “Blogun” and no more than a measly $15 a month on contextual advertising from Google.

Martha Ketro uses a blog as a working tool. I was never interested in monetizing it
Photo: Sergey Kiselev, Kommersant

Another approach

A lot of technical difficulties and inconsistencies with the dominant financial ideology in RuNet, as well as a total lack of mutual respect among bloggers, which interferes with healthy business relationships, make monetization a difficult and ineffective task, especially when a person “hones” a blog specifically for earning money. An opponent of direct monetization, Leonid Kaganov, a science fiction writer with significant weight in the Russian blogosphere (3rd place in the top ten blogs according to Yandex), believes that even breeding long-haired Angora hamsters will be significantly more profitable. It is clear that this state of affairs does not stop bloggers trying to solve the monetization problem using available means.

At the moment, the role of a simple guy who has undertaken to conquer a peak accessible only to celebrities in the Russian-language blogosphere is played by a resident of Ukrainian Kremenchug, Igor Bigdan (ibigdan.livejournal.com; more than 3 thousand subscribers, 10 thousand visitors per day). A former programmer who turned into a blogger, in six months he moved from the second fifty of the Yandex ranking to an honorable 4th place. His magazine, as he himself admits, “consists 90% of copy-paste” (that is, of pictures, videos and texts obtained from other Internet resources), while the public is attracted to him not so much by the repost of online “newsies and button accordions”, as much as the story of a man who decided to live and feed his family on money obtained exclusively through a blog. Igor estimates the level of monetization of his blog at 40-50% of the possible. In absolute figures, the figure still fluctuates around $250-300 per month. Even if these numbers were doubled, it would be difficult to call the result successful monetization, which every blogger should strive for. In addition, the place of the main copy-paste artist in the ranking of Yandex blogs is a very precarious position; the characters here change approximately once a year. Bigdan, in order to prove his own worth, needs to hold on to his current position at least until next autumn and, of course, significantly increase his earnings.

In the meantime, much better results, according to the general opinion, are brought to the blogger not by direct monetization with banners and paid postings, but by indirect monetization, when the blog serves as a tool for achievements in the offline world and a corresponding increase in personal well-being. An example is writer Marta Ketro (marta-ketro.livejournal.com). She admits that her writing career would not have happened without the blog, which she started exclusively for herself and never bothered with the task of making money. An employee of the Tsentrpolygraph publishing house, having seen her texts on LiveJournal, contributed to the publication of her first book, Hop-Hop, Snail, in 2006. The book ended up in the AST publishing house, which took the young writer under its wing and now regularly publishes paper books authored by her. According to Marta, she only started using the blog to promote her creations and other work needs in the third year of its existence, but now she can’t imagine her work life without it: it helps to test out new ideas in public before implementing them in a book, and persuade the publisher to a new contract, and organize projects related to journalism.

Another worthy example is the Kiev blogger Andrey Unabomber (unab0mber.livejournal.com), who formulated, perhaps, the most sober and adequate attitude towards monetization. Having started a diary in 2007 with the goal of learning how to express his thoughts in writing, the Unabomber quickly gained considerable popularity on the Russian-language Internet and began to explore the monetization opportunities that had opened up. He consistently tried Google AdSense (a three-week ad run in a magazine with 70,000 monthly readers brought in $26) and sponsored postings (many regular readers of his blog greeted this with near hysteria). And he came to the disappointing conclusion that blogging is unlikely to replace his main job (Andrey is an engineer). And yet, the blog, acting as a kind of showcase where the Unabomber demonstrates his skills and capabilities for his own pleasure, is already able to provide some real income on the side. In particular, he was approached with an offer of cooperation by the Russian magazine Smena, where Andrei now writes notes about the Internet, as well as the Life.ru portal, where he is responsible for the “Strange News” section (headlines in the style of “A gay killed a lesbian’s three-legged cat.” and “The oldest man turned out to be a tree” are attached). Work proposals, says the Unabomber, continue to come, and although there is not enough time and energy for their immediate implementation, they can clearly help him in the future to painlessly part with an eight-hour working day in the office.

Businessmen from the blog