Blogs as demanding as toddlers, and monetized blogging

Scary words–“It’s not not fun,” says the editor-in-chief of Jezebel, which today attracts almost ten million hits a month. “But it’s more like the blog is a baby, and it has to be tended to at all times. And the baby might grow up a bit, but it’s never going to get past the age of 2 or 3 in terms of how much it demands of you.”

Anna Holmes of jezebel.com
Being in charge of the sharpest, snarkiest, most popular women’s blog around sounds as if it should be a lot of fun. Anna Holmes pauses and chooses her words.

“It’s not not fun,” says the editor-in-chief of Jezebel, which launched in May 2007 and today attracts almost ten million hits a month. “But it’s more like the blog is a baby, and it has to be tended to at all times. And the baby might grow up a bit, but it’s never going to get past the age of 2 or 3 in terms of how much it demands of you.”

From the spare room of her New York apartment, Holmes oversees blogging on a near-industrial scale as she commissions a team of writers who churn out a new post every 10 minutes for almost 12 hours a day, addressing anything from urinary tract infection vaccines, via dating and stupid celebrities, to the evils of glossy women’s magazines’ airbrushed covers. Typically, a working day will stretch to 11 or 12 hours at her computer.

“I don’t want to say it’s ruined my life – I don’t want to put it that way. But it’s reconfigured it in a way that’s probably extremely unhealthy. A social life? Nah, I don’t have one,” she chuckles. “That’s the problem with the internet: it’s always on.”

MAKING A LIVING BY WRITING ABOUT ONESELF

Heather B. Armstrong
dooce.com 

 Dooce.com was created in 2001 for Armstrong to post musings on pop culture and gleefully acerbic accounts of life as a “recovering Mormon”. When she had her first baby, though, “the blog traffic tripled in one day”: people wanted to know what happened next. So she blogged about everything, from her postpartum depression to mischievous takes on the foibles of daily life.

It was in 2005 that her husband suggested they could make a living if she accepted advertising. “I said, ‘No! No! No!’ I was very scared about the idea of supporting my family with a blog.” But she relented, becoming one of the first professional personal bloggers. Since then, she’s been given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Weblog Awards, been cited in Forbes’ Most Influential Women in Media list, written books and, now, met the President.

“And some people still reckon, ‘Who does she think she is?’ Which is fair. I was this housewife, and no one in their right mind would have hired me to write about my life,” she says. “So I just did it myself.”

I find this interesting as after turning down the first few offers of sponsored posts, I now do accept sponsorship–mainly from big companies I am comfortable with–Barclays Bank, Paypal, Pizza Hut, Hewlett Packard, and a few advertising campaigns. Basically, I provide advertising space in a blog post, and they pay me–enough for me to keep my blogs running without feeling guilty that I am wasting time on this most pleasurable pursuit. 

I have tried blogging before, but before I monetized my blogs I could not stick it out for more than a week or two. I felt guilty about the time spent on blogging when I could have been doing more lucrative writing. Monetizing my blogs enables me to continue blogging. You were right, Heather Armstrong.