Earlier this week I wrote about certain A-listers hanging up their blogging uniforms, largely inspired by Newsweeks’ Dan Lyons and his blogging disillusionment moment. Many of our readers responded with their opinions on blogging, and now the original blogger, Dave Winer, offers his own rebuttal.
Dave Winer
It’s a simple counterargument framed in symbols and numbers: $3 million. That’s how much Winer claims to have made from his blog over the years, sans advertising.
While running a company, Winer used his blog to talk about what the company was doing. Net profit: $500k. Consulting gigs stemming from the blog: “a few hundred thousand.” Sale of weblogs.com to Verisign after only mentioning it on his blog: $2.3 million.
“So we’re already over $3 million — and all I did was what any blogger does — talk about what I’m doing. And that’s the role of a blog, it’s a way of communicating what you’re doing. Companies, consultants and authors need to do a lot of communicating, and blogs allow you to go direct, and be more efficient, less diluted. People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you’re like as a person.”
Then again, Winer did sort of invent RSS, among other things. That might have helped.
Regardless of whether one has enough geek cred to profit from his or her blog (or owns a fortunate domain name), Winer makes a great point about how a blog can make a person money without AdSense. Your blog is how you communicate about your business, product, service, or art, to the world. The only requirements are that you be interesting, passionate, and committed.
