It's probably the most frequent question I get from non-bloggers: "so, how exactly do people make money from all this?" How to make money from content when so much is being given away, is indeed a worthy question.
Jeff Jarvis addresses this issue in a great article called "The Free Me". It starts with a discussion on the flaws of "micropayment" (and indeed, its irrelevance to many bloggers), moves on to the necessary conditions for making money from content, and closes by noting a number of overlooked business opportunities in a world that includes lots of high quality free content. As Jeff puts it:
bq. "Clay's provocative lead is that micropayments won't work. But what he's really saying is that free content will work -- is working -- in ways that are more revolutionary than we even know."
Meanwhile, on another front dealing with blogging and dollars, Mike Daley points me to a recent issue of Harvard Business Review. HBR is a big deal among the business management set, and one of its recent articles had several experts weigh in on the issue of dealing with a blogger employee. The advice given is encouraging for bloggers, and definitely something you should consider showing your management if your blog might become a live issue.
Hmmm...well some of us blog just for fun, so I'm not sure money is an issue. But it's definitely a good idea for people that read blogs regularly to toss a few bucks into the tip jar (if there is one). I've done that in the past I hope a lot of other people have too.
As Jeff points out, many of us aren't blogging for money anyway (note the lack of a tip jar here) - and that's becoming a factor in the content universe. I thought his article explaining how businesses can deal with that reality was very interesting.
Glad you found my synopsis of the piece linkworthy. Turns out that Halley Suitt, the blogger (and dot-com management type) who wrote the article, is going to be giving a presentation as Glove Girl at Harvard's BloggerCon next month.