The folks over at Dell’s Digital Nomad tipped me off to the WSJ article, “America’s New Profession: Bloggers for Hire.” Paid bloggers are one the rise, almost 1% of the American population now have a job blogging. Author Mark Penn writes, “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.”
Staggering. In fact, I met The Tracksuit CEO Daniel Hope at SXSW and he shared with his breakout group, Blog on Company Time–and get paid, that he was receiving a graduate education at the University of Texas in exchange for blogging for the university. Amazing.
You should probably read the article yourself instead of me regurigitating the amazing article. He even cites the fourth estate and dubs a new fifth estate. Here are some cool employment stats provided in the article:
Comparing Job Numbers in America
| Lawyers | 555,770 |
| Bloggers | 452,000 |
| Bartenders | 498,090 |
| Computer Programmers | 394,710 |
| CEOs | 299,160 |
| Firefighters | 289,710 |
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
A gut check on this WSJ article by Yoda – one of Room Eight’s most prolific bloggers:
“I’m sorry to have to explain this to Penn, who is the CEO of an international corporation, but bloggers saying they want to make money is not the same as them actually profiting from their work!”
More here:
http://www.r8ny.com/blog/yoda/mark_penn_still_cooking_the_books.html