Browsing through GalleyCat this morning I was led to this long and interesting post about how to make money out of blogging. Although Steve Pavlina is essentially in the self-improvement business, which is home to a great deal of quackery, what he says is very sensible. In particular he’s right that those who are good at creating content are by no means always good at selling it, and if you want to make a success of being self-employed you have to be good at selling yourself (or very lucky, which may be more true in my case). On the other hand, selling yourself without having anything worth selling is an equally big mistake, and doubtless the one that leads to some of the bizarre query letters that La Gringa has been talking about.

Then again, if you are not cut out to make money from blogging, no one says you have to do so. You do, however, need to enjoy what you are doing. I was particularly struck by Pavlina’s comments about cynics late on in the post. He says:

When you commit to blogging for income instead of merely blogging as a hobby, you’ll surely have to deal with cynics who whine and complain that you’ve somehow joined the dark side, as if you’ve done them serious personal harm by deciding to get paid for your work instead of bending over backwards to serve their needs for free.

[snip]

Serving the ungrateful doesn’t make for an enjoyable long-term business. It doesn’t even amount to much of a hobby.

I suspect that there may be one or two conrunners out there who can relate to that.

So you don’t have to make money, and I’m certainly not planning to. If I had a high profile blog again I’m pretty sure I know the sort of thing that would happen. On the other hand, I would not mind SFAW turning in a bit of cash, because then I would be able to pay people for content. Given that I’m never likely to be able to make any money writing, the best I can do is help other people who are far better at it than me make a living. But, as we all know, even with sound advice from the likes of Mr. Pavlina, it is hard to bring in any significant amount of money. Much of the Internet economy is dependent on payment for clicks (and in the case of spammers desperately trying to create links that will be clicked). If you are wedded to this type of approach you may be disappointed by this post from danah boyd.

The message that appears to be coming through from research into Internet behavior is that the vast majority of clicking on ads is done by people who are too poor to actually buy much. (They are also predominantly male, which may explain why most spam is directed at men.) The people who do spend a lot of money online don’t click on ads. Once the advertisers start realizing this, the supply of ad money may start to dry up.

(Incidentally, the system of demographic breakdown in the bubble chart that boyd presents is also quite interesting. There’s a link to an explanation of the categories in the comments. My guess is that Kevin and I, and probably most of you folks, are in the Upscale America group, or the equivalent in whatever country you come from.)

What really prompted all this thought, however, is that I’m reading this stuff at the same time as I’m reading Iain Banks’ Matter, and it is becoming clear to me that the Internet is very like The Culture. It isn’t a cash economy. Even most of the software you need is free these days. And the people providing entertainment are doing so because it is fun to do so. The only real difference appears to be that The Culture doesn’t seem to have much of a celebrity obsession. Possibly Banks thinks that once people are so wealthy that they have access to anything they might reasonably want then they will no longer wish to be famous, or worship the famous. I tend to be of the opposite view. I suspect that human beings are basically competitive animals, and if they can’t become richer or more powerful than anyone else, then they will compete for the one thing that everyone cannot have: fame.