Rock the Cashblog
Jeremy C. Wright recently sold his weblog for CAN $19,000. Congratulations to Jeremy, that’s some quality coin. Judging by the usual indicators (Technorati, Bloglines subscribers, that ecosystem thingy, number of comments, etc), his is a fairly well-read weblog, but not enormously popular. Probably not in the top #100. I’m not dissing Jeremy–I’m just trying to get a sense of the nascent marketplace. There’s some related discussion on Jeremy’s site and on Blog Business World.
I like the terms ‘blog farming’ and ‘blogrepreneur’. In a way, this is a natural evolution of domain squatting. Instead of simply being clever enough to buy LindsayLohan.com before her agent does, now you have to invest time and energy into building something of value. Once you do, you can sell it off for a small profit.
Alternately, they’re like one-person startups, where you work really hard for a few years and then reap the rewards. Except that in this case the hard work and rewards are both pretty small–you might spend half-an-hour a day blogging and make a little cash at the end. To throw around some vague numbers, lets say Jeremy spent half-an-hour blogging every day for the past 2.5 years (I think that’s how long he’s be at it). That works out to about CAN $40/hour. Not exactly a lottery winning, but great money for doing something you enjoy.
Don’t all go out and start cashblogs. This is all highly speculative, and will probably take months or years to shake itself out.
UPDATE: There’s further fiscal analysis here.
