This is heartwrenching: 

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

The NYT article outlines the grim reality of writers who make their living from blogging: traffic generates ad revenue. 

Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

I’ve noticed this trend not only in technology blogs, but political blogs, gossip blogs, and fashion blogs…among others. The pressure to load fresh content on an hour-by-hour basis can literally kill bloggers. I don’t know how Perez Hilton does it by himself.

Getting paid to write whether it be on a blog or a magazine or newspaper is one and the same to me, and good blogs rely on good writing. Therese and I take pride in Writer Unboxed, and the posts we and our contributers write. We hope we add something useful to the public discourse about genre fiction.

But you might notice something about us that’s different from other blogs: we don’t have ads.

Oh, every so often we kick it around. We certainly generate enough traffic to make it worthwhile. But we like the look of our ad-free blog. We also don’t want to have the added pressure of generating click-throughs and page loads to keep the revenue flowing, chained to our computers feverishly surfing the ‘Net for fresh tidbits. 

In short, we are only beholden to ourselves and our readers.

We might change our minds in the future. But we’d rather blog because we want to, not because we need to. 

 

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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