Image by Vicki's Pics via FlickrMark Penn wrote an interesting article titled America's Newest Profession: Blogging in the Wall Street Journal. However, I would contend that blogging is a profession. There are as many kinds of blogging as there are bloggers and while a number of 452,000 bloggers earning their living primarily through this seems a huge number - we've got to recognise that many of these might be journalists and writers - people who would earned their living writing for magazines/papers a decade ago.
Anyway, here are some of the numbers - and I would think this would only grow - as organizations slowly turn to content creation and transform into media outlets to feed a community of customers
Anyway, here are some of the numbers - and I would think this would only grow - as organizations slowly turn to content creation and transform into media outlets to feed a community of customers
In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.
Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.
The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's. And that's nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: "It's my work he'd say, I do it for pay."
