How much money does a blogger have to make before mainstream media accepts them as successful?

I recently read an article in Newsweek by Daniel Lyons which made me laugh. Not because it was funny, but because it was yet another pathetic attempt by the mainstream media to take a swipe at blogging.

Maybe that’s a little bit scathing, but when you look at it from my point of view, or from any successful bloggers point of view, it really does seem like the desperate ramblings of a dinosaur industry frustrated by the drop in their own advertising revenue.

I’ll quote from the article and respond after each segment. The introductory paragraph reads as follows,

For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy.

My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.

Eventually I shut down—not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.

Let’s start by taking a good look at the detail behind the disparaging comments. Daniel began by pretending to be someone else, he used blogger on the free blogspot host and used Google Adsense.

Pretending to me someone else isn’t the best way to start a business, Blogger isn’t a good choice for pro bloggers, blogspot, along with any free host, is a waste of time since you don’t have the necessary control, and Google Adsense is worse than useless.

And he’s annoyed that he didn’t make any money.

Had he used a real host and monetized the blog correctly he would have made a fortune from that traffic.

He claims that he struck an advertising deal which paid better wages but then says that he closed down the blog soon afterwards.

Daniel, how is that the fault of the medium? Can’t you see that had you simply blogged professionally, with a professional host and with well thought out monetization, you could have made a lot of money?

It gets worse however as Lyons tries to find further justification for his critique,

Now others seem to be riding the same downward curve, with euphoria giving way to exhaustion. Michael Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog empire attracts 6 million readers each month, has gone on a monthlong hiatus after three years of nonstop blogging. His break was prompted, he says, by burnout and by the craziness of the blogosphere (he says he’s been stalked, threatened and spat on) and not by the fact that he’s been trying to sell his company for a year and hasn’t been able to find a buyer who’ll pay his price, which is rumored to be $100 million.

Let’s be absolutely clear. Michael Arrington gets in trouble because he constantly attacks giant swathes of the blogging community. I can remember very clearly the day he called all musicians idiots.

I’m not condoning the actions of the lunatics that stalk him but if you throw enough rocks you will eventually have a few thrown back at you.

Besides, TechCrunch makes a lot of money. And that’s an understatement. Arrington is rich. The shear fact that he is asking $100 million for TechCrunch proves that he is making a fortune month after month, year after year.

And Michael Arrington, much as I dislike him and his views, built that empire, and that multi million dollar blogging income, in just three years.

The article continues,

To be sure, some blogs are little goldmines. Gizmodo, a gadget blog run by Gawker Media, had record traffic last month, with 98 million page views, and is “fantastically profitable,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton says. Dooce, a personal-diary blog run by a husband-and-wife team, does between $500,000 to $1 million a year, according to Federated Media, which sells ads for the site. Arrington says TechCrunch did $3 million in 2007 and even more in 2008. He says he could sell the company today, albeit for a lower price than it would have fetched a year ago.

Perhaps Daniel doesn’t think that between $500,000 and $1 million a year for a personal blog is good enough. Maybe he thinks Arrington should try harder and considers $3 million a paltry amount.

How much money do these professional bloggers need to make before people like Daniel Lyons accept the fact that blogging is a genuine and legitimate route to financial independence?

Daniel, and anyone else in mainstream media land that doesn’t believe it, I’ve got three words for you.

Blogging. Makes. Money.

Ashley Morgan is a UK jazz trumpet player and owner of independent record label 447 Records. Ashley Morgan is the trumpet player with Enormous.