写博客也能成为职业美国诞生专职博客写手

[美国毕业生起薪人均下降]Those who are graduating in the spring and land a job will see erage starting salary offers fall 1.7% from last year to $47,673, according to the National Assoc...+阅读

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary ine from posting their opinions than Americans working as puter programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks he grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some ine is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of ine. Thats almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone elses. And thats nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: Its my work hed say, I do it for pay.

This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth. The Information Age has spawned many new professions, but blogging could well be the one with the most profound effect on our culture. If journalists were the Fourth Estate, bloggers are being the Fifth Estate.

What started as a discussion forum for progressive politics and new technologies has now been applied to motherhood, health care, the arts, fashion, dentistry -- and just about every other imaginable area of life. What started as a hobby and an outlet for volunteers is being big business for newly emerging sites, for panies that now depend upon their reviews and for the people who work in this new industry.

Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-erage ines. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an ine of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as spokesbloggers -- paid by advertisers to blog about products. As a job with zero muting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around -- but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial. At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.