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Blogging is emerging as career

Some blogs are turning into full-blown publishing companies, but how should they handle the new species of blog writers for hire? Sabrina Dent finds out - and gets fired in the process

It's probably every blogger's dream: after months or years spent blogging in relative obscurity, an Internet publisher with big ideas and slightly less capital knocks on the virtual door and says "Come blog for us."

This is nanopublishing, the blogger's best chance to get paid small, low-cost enterprises where niche blogging (travel, politics, gadgets) meets the business world. Multiple niche posts every day attract multiple niche visitors; multiple niche visitors in turn attract multiple niche advertisers, and both the publishers and the advertisers are happy.

And the blogger is happy, too. Blogging gigs lend legitimacy and no small amount of cachet to a writer's Internet voice. They also offer the blogger a chance at a wider audience and some professional marketing backup. And they pay, too, though it's hardly the road to a dotcom fortune. The monthly base rate varies from publisher to publisher, but I can assure you that it's less than the enterprising gal can make in 30 minutes on a good class of street corner but then, unless your name is Devine Brown, there's not a lot of cachet in that line of work. More to the point, perhaps, it's also considerably less money than the average freelance journalist is paid: if you take two posts of 100 words per day, and multiply it by 30 days a month, it averages out to about 25% of the going rate for 6,000 words.

Blogging, of course, is not journalism, and the argument that bloggers should be paid at standard journalism rates won't take anyone very far. Nanopublishing blogs have nothing like the readership or advertising revenue of traditional print media, for a start, and lack the financial muscle to pay print rates.

It stands to reason, then, that the nanopublishing market isn't financially mature enough to pay bloggers for exclusivity of authorship, either. After all, if a magazine wants a writer to write for nobody else, the magazine puts them on staff and compensates them accordingly. Otherwise, the writer is free to write for any magazine, including direct competitors with the same content, the same readers, and the same advertisers. The last time I checked, both Cosmopolitan and Glamour were both still in business.

As a freelancer, I write about pretty much anything for anyone who would like to pay me. As I discovered in the blogging world, however, it doesn't always work this way. Online, I earn a large segment of my blogging reputation from writing in the travel niche, and when I was simultaneously solicited by two different blog publishers to blog about travel for two different markets, I took both gigs without a second thought.

When Weblogs Inc's travel blog Gadling launched, Azeem Azhar at Mink Media had no problem with me writing for both Mink Media and Weblogs Inc. When Mink Media's travel blog launched ten days later, Jason Calacanis at Weblogs Inc, did have a problem, and promptly and politely fired me.

I was, I admit, somewhat baffled. There is simply not enough money in flat-fee blogging for writers to limit themselves and their financial capacity in an emerging and rapidly expanding market. If a publisher feels they have too much invested in the success of a title to share a freelance resource with anyone else, then surely the publisher needs to invest in that writer accordingly, either with cash on the bedside table or with revenue sharing of some flavour?

Bottom line: a blog publisher owns the advertising space around the writer, not the writer. Any publisher who wants 100% of my time is going to have to set me up in a nice apartment with a reasonable shopping allowance and a healthy revenue share.

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