WSJ ran an article yesterday about making money from blogging. There was a healthy dose of skepticism about the entire notion, but Calacanis made a quote that pretty much nailed it:

However, you are correct that the majority of folks are not going to make a living from blogs, but that’s because they choose not to try, not because they couldn’t. If folks focus in on a niche and own it there is a good chance they could make half a living from blogging.

This gets to the quality dynamic that I am interested in seeing more research on, and alluded to in my comments about Dave’s state of the blogosphere report recently. The great majority of blogs are simply copy-and-paste pages or blogs posted to erratically and/or with little insight or originality. I want to find the ones that are attempting to “own” a space.

Take a look at Tom Foremski as someone who is making a living from blogging, and what you will no doubt notice is that he is making money from blogging by approaching it as a job and not a hobby. Tom is also a journalist by training, a skill set that is obviously highly leverageable into blogging, as is the case with Matt and Mike.

People often ask me if I run or want to run advertisements. I’ve thought about it, and in fact I did have some ads on my typepad blog, but I just feel that I need to build this thing out a little more before I can qualify myself in that respect. Like a lot of bloggers I have talked with lately, we all seem to be asking the question “what’s next”, which I guess you could characterize as a true inflection point. It’s difficult at times for me to devote the time required to blogging what I think is worth reading (after all, I do have an actual job outside of this!), but at the same time I enjoy a lot of personal and professional reward for doing it.

I don’t think google adsense is the way to go for me (I’m still irritated at Google anyway) but dedicated sponsors does seem like a good fit. I am in the midst of developing out a new set of templates and widgets for Venture Chronicles and getting some brand issues sorted out, I’m loosely estimating that in 6 weeks I’ll be able to roll this out and at that time I’ll have a better platform to consider monetizing it to at least cover my costs.

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