El negocio de ser bloggero

El gran problema de internet es que aún las audiencias no logran buenos niveles de medición (más allá de lo obvio) que permitan transformarlas en un negocio para los avisadores. Sólo así se explica que Facebook tenga 200 millones de usuarios y no pueda rentabilizar el negocio (aunque sus ingresos mejoran) y que se sitúe la sensación de estar en medio de una segunda burbuja. De todas maneras, los ingresos online siguen aumentando y, más allá de la industria tradicional instalada en la web, son los blogs los que muestran que "junto con ganar la batalla de la infraestructura y la participación" (Fogel) están ganando la batalla económica. Sólo en EE.UU. se estima que los lectores de blogs llegarán a 123 millones en 2013 y hoy ya hay cerca de 402 mil personas que obtienen sus primeros ingresos (no pocos) actuando como bloggeros. Cifra que obviamente se incrementa mes a mes. Un artículo de WSJ muestra como esta nueva "profesión" ya es más atractiva que muchas actividades productivas.

Por Mark Penn
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 income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have 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 income 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 income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's. And that's nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: "It's my work he'd 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 becoming the Fifth Estate.